Throw Away Test Automation
Business Agility Requires Disposable Test Assets
Whitepaper Overview
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.
The biggest barrier of adoption of automation remains the level of maintenance required to sustain it!
Why is Test Automation so Cumbersome?
Traditional test automation systems originated in a world that moved at a much slower pace, where waterfall developments were the only game in town and no-one attempted to tackle fast moving, mission-critical applications, they knew that the technology simply couldn’t keep up.
These products all get their capabilities from powerful scripting languages; something that sounds good in a presentation but has become a horror in the real world, requiring a cult of high priests (highly skilled (and paid) test automation engineers) to communicate with the complex and mysterious deity; the test automation tool.
Worse still is what happens when an application to be tested changes.
This Original Insight explores the adoption of automation and the challenges of implementing automation in an Agile environment:
