Quite confused , why I have chosen this topic to write. Pretty much interestingly this is not about car automation or flight automation. This is completely about Software Testing Automation. What is testing ?? Where it comes ?? why it is so important ???
In software development life cycle, there are various stages in it,
- Area Under investigation
- Feasibility study,
- Dialog Design
- Code Design
- Implementation
- Testing
- Turnover
- Maintanance.
Will discuss the other parts later , now comes the testing part. when the sofware comes into the phase of implementation, the next immediate process is to test the software and make sure that, it does not have any bug on that. One who test the software is termed as quality control engineer.
Testing is the stage of the process and check whether the software is stable or not. Under testing, there are two kinds of testing, one is Manual Testing & the second one is Automation. In the former, where all things are manually done. How? For any defined software there will be a flow. That flow will be written as an use case. At the same time, for any flow there will be the functionality which is written as Test Case.
For eg:
Take a sample case of run a server and connect to the login client. How the usecase will be
UC_001:
1) start the server and connect the server using http://localhost:<port>
2)give the username and password as guest guest and press the submit,
3) check whether it gets redirected to next page .
How the test case will be:
Testcase ID: Description: Status : Expected Result: Result came: Result status
TC_001: start the server. critical server should server started Pass
check whether start
the server has started
So this is what a test case is called. How does automation plays an important role. Automation makes the QC Engineer job easier from writing testcases. Instead of writing 1000’s of testcases manually and testing each and every one of it . So “AUTOMATION” is totally defined as automating the testcases.
Some of my friends are in the automation and they automate the software on its working behaviour. For eg: in the login page there are so many cases to cover such as field blank , password wrong. special characters, and so on. But they are just automating it for correct login credentials alone which is not the good way of automation. It is as simple as they are automating the product and not the testcase.
I would sincerely request all to all the QC Engineers to understand the concept of automation and what automation is all about and how to implement it. Do not just do it in your way.
Regards
Sami
September 10, 2009 at 12:51 pm |
Hmm.. interesting.. but you did miss out one point sami.. You are talking about Automation serving as a replacement for manual. Well, automation was never supposed to be for that. Automation in its true essence is only supposed to help a manual tester, get done with the following:
Lets say everytime a new version of yahoo mail gets implemented, someone would have to sit and test, whether a user can send an email, recieve an email and so on and so forth. Now these are the regular things that have to be tested everytime. It is cover up these rudiment procedure is why automation came into existence. No amount of automation can to be honest, replace the catchy eyes of a vehement manual tester. Hope this clears out some misconception if not everything dude