Beautiful Testing

Chapter 8. Beautiful Large-Scale Test Automation

Alan Page

Automated testing can be much more than simply writing and running tests that operate without human intervention. Alas, for many testers, automated testing consists only of the manual generation of test scripts or code that executes some specified test scenario or piece of product functionality. Consideration of the logistics of running the tests is too often an afterthought of the automation process.

Most testers are familiar with the claim that automated testing has the potential to save time. However, in many cases, test automation doesn’t actually save the amount of time that testers and their management team have anticipated. In reality, many automation attempts fail because other than the actual test execution, none of the remainder of the process is automatic. For automation to be successful, especially on a large scale, the entire end-to-end process—from the moment the tester completes the authoring of the test until results are analyzed and available for viewing—must be automatic. Without this level of automation, the amount of time testers spend monitoring automation systems will quickly grow out of hand.

When I was young, my parents went to a fireworks stand and bought one of those big packages of fireworks. We eagerly waited until it got dark, and then our family went outside on our patio and began our show. We had quite a variety of explosions and showers of sparks and were generally entertained. It was a bit of ...