Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Last week I talked about the silliness of wasting time calculating the return on investment (ROI) of an automation effort on any non-trivial software project; especially if it has an extended shelf-life. As my friend Joe Strazzre commented, “If you need an ROI analysis to convince business management that test [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Saturday, August 15, 2009
My daughter made me laugh today when she offered a bit of her philosophy. She told me that her favorite candy is gummy bears “because gummy bears get stuck between your teeth, and then you can dig out a second helping with your tongue.” I never really thought of [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Saturday, August 01, 2009
When many people think of test automation they envision rudimentary scripts with hard-coded events and data that manipulate user interface objects much the same way a customer might interact with the software to accomplish a pre-defined, robot-like task. Perhaps this is the reason there is a plethora of tools available [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, May 14, 2009
Regardless of the personal opinions of a few people, the simple fact is that the demand for software testers who can design and develop effective test automation is increasing. Perhaps one reason for the distain by some folks in the industry is due to limitations of the test automation approach [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Last month I wrote about simplistic views of UI test automation in which some people want to pretend that recording for playback or scripting hard-coded actions and data to mimic some human’s interactions at the keyboard is an automated test. Balderdash! Automating a set of sequences or preconceived steps simply [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Thursday, March 12, 2009
There are many approaches to test automation from unit testing to system level testing through the GUI. Of course, the most often discussed approach is the automation approach that drives the GUI to perform some action; or GUI automation. This also happens to be the most controversial approach to [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Sunday, January 04, 2009
I am generally not a big fan of static data in test automation, but being a pragmatic person, I know there are clearly times when using data-driven testing is just plain common-sense. For example, data-driven testing is an effective automation approach when designing ‘black-box’ tests for testing an API.
Data-driven testing [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, December 02, 2008
There are occasionally times during an automated test needs to create a temporary file during the execution of that test. The problem is that often this file is left behind on the system, or even worse stored in some obscure directory on a server. I say worse because those [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Templates can be useful tools to help increase individual efficiency and team consistency. Yet, I am sometimes quite surprised that some organizations lack standard templates for such daily routines such as bug reporting, status reporting, and even test cases. There are some in the industry who shun templates because [...]
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Originally Published Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Occasionally, the execution or outcome of a test depends on the operating system version on which the test is executed. Platform profiling is important because subtle differences in operating system platforms can affect how certain tasks are carried out, inclusion or exclusion of specific features or capabilities, work-arounds, or even [...]