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Choosing what to automate. Mike Girenko

July 14th, 2008

When planning GUI level Automated testing, one of the main questions is what to automate. Build Acceptance testing and Regression Testing are two most common candidates for automation. When deciding, consider the balance between effort and benefit.

Some tests are easy to automate. Examples are:
1. Data-driven tests. When the same function needs to be validated with lots of different inputs or large data sets (login, search)
2. Short or simple transactions
3. Tests with stable and easy to generate results
4. Static and repetitive tests

Some tests are more difficult to automate:
1. Tests involving complex business logic
2. Tests with difficult to predict results
3. Cross-browser testing. Even if many tools for automated testing work with IE and FireFox, a test will not run on both browsers without extra effort.

When choosing what to automate, it is a good idea to start with a small set of tests covering only main functionality, which should give some short-term success and a working set of scripts, which can be used for testing. Then these scripts can be expanded to cover more functionality and eventually cover Regression Testing.

Mike Girenko

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  1. 2 Responses to “Choosing what to automate.”

  2. By ftorres on Jul 15, 2008 | Reply

    GUI automated testing, is always a problem. Not because the UI may change,
    but because there are so many possibilities that the test source code becomes
    always difficult to maintain.
    Even when refactoring on a daily basis, I am not alway happy of the test code
    structure.

    Using languages like C#, VB.NET and Visual Studio (including the refactoring feature)
    has proven to be helpfull. I think Ruby and Python are pretty good. Please stop
    writting automation in VB or VBScript.

    For functional web testing in C# or VB.NET integrated with Visual Studio,
    check out InCisif.net

  3. By Mike Girenko on Jul 16, 2008 | Reply

    There are other concepts that should help with GUI automated testing, including modular design, separation of data and scripts, separation of navigation steps and checkpoints, and so on.
    Since we are using Quick Test Pro as a tool for automated testing, we cannot avoid using VBScript.

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