Archive for the ‘Automated Testing’ Category

Software Testing Resolutions for 2012

It’s alwys amazing how every year the month of January sparks the desire in many people to reflect on past promises, challenges and successes. Once the moment has gone, a sense of clarity and a surge of determination takes root, and a new list of promises kick-starts a change and a passion to do well for the new year ahead.

Although this helps set about many good changes, trying to stick to these promises can sometimes prove quite a challenge! How many of you can relate to the the goal of, “I shall join the gym and get fit and healthy”? Unfortunately for some, by February this ambitious goal is broken and by March the very idea of keeping it is mere wishful thinking!

Although harmless if broken, what would happen if the promises you made effect your business? What if your company was sold promises such as:

Provide a code-free testing tool for QA.
Offer good customer support.
Ease the burden of application testing.

Now imagine what would happen if these promises were broken! The impact to your business would be quite damaging.

As a software vendor in the Application Quality Management space, we prefer to keep the promises we make to our customers. So on that note, Original Software would like to lay down a few promises this year that the testing community should also consider following.

2012 New Year’s Resolutions

I will focus on testing rather than scripting – why should a tester require programming skills. We believe that empowering your subject matter experts to define and execute sophisticated tests without the need to use any kind of code is the kind of promise that is worth keeping. So we promise to continue innovating our code-free solution in order to remove the burden of code-based script maintenance.
I will stop being the drag on Agile development teams – traditional test tools struggle to work in an Agile environment. This is mainly due to the fact that they were designed to work in a ‘test last’ environment whereas the agile model is more a ‘test first, test continuously’ model. Our promise is to support the Agile community with a solution that will provide a dynamic and efficient testing solution for your Agile projects.
I will not forget about the test data – regulatory compliance and data protection laws continue to have an ever greater impact upon the ways that companies do business. We want to make testing on live data a thing of the past and help you create subsets of data that retain their referential integrity, and provide a perfect miniature copy of your live environment.
I will stop insisting that BAs and end users should test manually – the UAT phase of your application delivery requires business process expertise in order to check that the application meets business expectations. This means relying on business users to test the new or upgraded system. We promise to supply a solution that is able to capture the business process knowledge from the lines of business.
I will stop pretending I can run a professional quality organisation on spread sheets and scraps of paper – it’s amazing how many companies still reply on spreadsheets and paper to manage the QA process. We promise to show you a way that enables you to unite all aspects of your quality lifecycle, across all stakeholders, from one central point.

If you have any Software Testing Resolutions for 2012 that you would like to share, we would love to hear them! Please feel free to comment back or tweet your resolution to @Origsoft.

A Testers Winter Tale How the Grinch Stole Scripting!

Every Tester in Testville liked testing a lot.
But the Grinch, who sat north of Development – did not.
The Grinch was a Tester and he hated the whole damn lot!
Now, please don’t ask why; no one quite knows the reason.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
Or it could be that his head wasn’t screwed on just right.
But I think that the most likely reason of all,
May have been that he sat alone near the wall,
Testing all night!
He looked such a fright!
Throwing quality away as the changes came again.
And there it sat on the shelf collecting dust.
Test Automation, “Oh what a fuss!”
How it failed to deliver him from his testing damnation.
So he finished his email with a large exclamation: “No not another software release!”
Staring down at his desk in QA with a sour grinchy frown,
He observed busy Testville and its Testers in town.
For he knew that every Software Tester was busy right now, testing the winter release.
Would there ever be peace!

With a focus on test automation software, we have published a seasonal Original Insight, aimed primarily at QA Management, that borrows the story of the Grinch* and highlights the challenges of software testing and the damage that can be done if the business gambles with software quality. It attempts to outline the main benefits of test automation in conjunction with pragmatic advice on software testing, whilst illustrating the negative impact that current dominating testing tools have had in the application quality lifecycle.

If you have a good sense of humour and believe that software testing does not need to be dull, this Original Insight is one for you to read!

The paper can be downloded as a PDF at: http://www.origsoft.com/grinch

I hope you enjoy reading this paper and let us know your thoughts!

*Originally from the children’s story by author Dr. Seuss, “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”.

Software Testing Breakfast Briefing in Chicago

During our daily interaction with the global testing community, we hear a similar theme on the challenges and issues faced by the testing and QA teams of companies, both large and small. Some of these include:

- How can we deliver quality applications within the budgetary constraints we face?
- How can we meet the growing demands of the business in a pragmatic and achievable way?
- What alternatives are there to reduce the business risk of poorly rolled out applications?
- Can I really ensure that my quality strategy helps my business gain a competitive advantage?

So with the above in mind, and if you are based in Chicago, would you like to join us for breakfast and enjoy an informative look at software testing? Join your fellow QA professionals at this briefing where you’ll have the opportunity to discuss all of these topics and more.

Find out more and register here!

TestDrive Nominated Best Automated Test Tool

Original Software is very proud to have been nominated in four different categories by The Automated Testing Institute for, “Best Automated Test Tool” for our solution TestDrive, and “Best Automated Testing Article”, written by George Wilson, Operations Director, Original Software. Please vote for us to win today!

The Automated Testing Institute (ATI), are hosting its third annual Automation Awards, which encourages the testing community to discuss, network and vote for the solutions that are currently representing cutting edge technology in test automation. The ATI operates based on the belief that more must be done to help software test automation reach its full potential. Automation can only be reached through moving the IT industry forward and establishing Automated Software Testing as an accepted discipline.

Our solution TestDrive has been nominated under the Commercial Tools Category for:
- Best Commercial FUNCTIONAL Automated Test Tool – Java
- Best Commercial FUNCTIONAL Automated Test Tool – Flash/Flex
- Best Commercial FUNCTIONAL Automated Test Tool – Web Services

We have also been nominated under the Communications Category for:
- Best Automated Testing Article, “Test automation: Business agility requires disposable test assets”

Please help us to show the testing community that software quality can be achieved through innovation.
VOTE FOR US HERE: http://www.origsoft.com/about/company-history/vote4us.php

Throwaway Test Automation?

There comes a time in every Software Tester’s career when test automation seems desirable. A QA utopia of shorter testing cycles and applications delivered on time! But unfortunately for most, that dream of application quality, as a result of more efficient testing through automation, has become more of a burden than a helping hand.

So why has test automation become so cumbersome?

Software test automation has been available for over a quarter of a century, but the practice still has many sceptics and the biggest barrier to adoption remains the level of maintenance required to sustain it.

Achieving just a moderate level of automation coverage requires considerable investment of budget and resource. With increasing software development complexity and more and more IT departments taking on an agile approach, traditional test automation has become too cumbersome for most to sustain.

You can explore this issue further by joining us on a webinar discussing why test automation has failed and why there is a need to have throwaway test automation!

Tesco Bank Should Have Tested on IE9

The news on CIO’s website of Tesco Bank having to issue emergency guidelines for Internet Explorer 9 users, made me chuckle.

Either testing on multiple browsers wasn’t carried out in full or the testing technology being used didn’t support IE9. Either way, Tesco Bank will be entering our ‘Software Testing Hall of Shame’ this week.

Perhaps the bank wasn’t aware that Original Software had announced its support for IE9 back in March: Original Software in Pole Position to Support Internet Explorer 9.

With Original Software you can discover an easier way to ensure your web applications are tested on all browsers.

Podcast: Innovations in Software Testing

Our very own Colin Armitage, CEO at Original Software, took to the stage along with HP, IBM and Microsoft to discuss the latest trends and innovations in the world of software testing. Topics under discussion included manual testing, agile testing and how test automation can be improved. Listen to the podcast here.

The Best of Both Worlds

Experts agree that test automation isn’t easy and there has been a lot of debate over which approach leads to better and easier test automation – record and playback or programmatic? Original Software took this debate one stage further and introduced an alternative paradigm to the discussion, during a live webinar. Our claim is that at the end of the day, testing needs to be quick and simple and a programmatic approach is slow, requires technical know how and is hard to maintain. However, simple record and playback technology isn’t the answer either.

The end goal should be to move testers AWAY from programming. After all, why write a program to test a program? The more flexible your programmatic test becomes, the more complex it becomes and the more difficult it becomes to maintain.

Our reputation for ease of use and innovation at Original Software has led us to develop a solution that doesn’t have any underlying programming, but it’s not a basic record and playback solution either – more like record,extend,repeat. The basic test is captured but then can be extended with branch logic, repetitive data, made to loop, check links, find values in tables or combos which might have moved, pass data around the test – without any programming. Fields move around all the time, especially in web pages. Testers shouldn’t expect to have to do anything in their scripts to cope with that, the solution should just deal with it without any human intervention.

With TestDrive, the test criteria is separated from the script. This is a huge contributor to the ease of maintenance. It makes scripts, and parts of scripts, usable in many tests. With good test and script design the number of scripts can be kept to a minimum while the number of automated tests can grow rapidly. Plus, if your application is very volatile and bits of it get thrown away and replaced on a frequent basis you can afford to throw away your automation if the investment to create it in the first place was minimal.

Surely this is valid script ‘maintenance’? Take a look for yourself by watching the recording of The Test Automation Debate – Programmatic versus Record and Playback today and tell us what you think.

The Test Automation Debate: Record & Playback versus Programmatic

HMRC Software Glitch Makes Returns Taxing

Yesterday, January 31st, was the last chance for self-assessors to submit their tax return online at the website for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). Even though the HMRC said only on Friday that their computer system was working well and they did not foresee the problems experienced in recent years, our majesty’s government failed to test thoroughly again!!

Apparently, accountants were having problems after it appeared that the company that supplies software which allows accountancy firms and advisors to access the HMRC website had shut its links early. Returns that should have taken no more than 10 minutes to file, were taking up to an hour. HMRC confirmed that some advisors using third party software were experiencing what they called a ‘slowdown’.

CCH Personal Tax was the software concerned and although its parent company, Wolters Kluwer, said they had not been notified of any issues with the software, problems certainly existed.

Now we can’t be sure what the problems really were, but this story is yet another example of poor or incomplete testing. Such high profile software glitches only go to justify Original Software’s mantra that “application quality must become a business imperative” – especially if government reputations are to remain unscathed.

Source: Yahoo News

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