However, its a good time to share the road ahead with you. But first, thanks to Rosie at Ministry Of Testing for sharing my original blog, and for getting some debate about it, some of which I've found useful.
- Who wants automation? Seems pretty obvious doesn't it? But what do people want and expect from automation? What's our role as testers? This is pretty important, as all too often I've seen people wanting to get automation "because everyone else has it".
- Zoology of automation. There isn't just one kind of automation type out there, we look at the different types, which we'll explore in more detail
- Unit checking. Ah, the mythical beast of "the unit test". We'll be looking at an example, and specifying some checks.
- What is a check? We'll look at the testing vs checking using some examples we will have created by this stage. The whole series uses the Michael Bolton / James Bach definitions of "checking not testing" for automation. This section will make it clearer.
- API checking. Again we'll look at it, and explore an example.
- GUI checking. For many of you, this will have been the only example of automation you were really familiar with it. We'll explore it.
- I'm not technical - HELP! We'll explore just how much you need to know about technical stuff to work and play well with automation.
- Defining great checks. We'll look at some common features on the internet, and work out how to define good checks for them.
- Maintainability. We'll look a little at some key coding concepts, and why it's important to keep them in mind.
- How many checks is too many? As well as the thinking to date on optimising your checking, we'll look at when your automation suite is becoming bloated.
- Oh it always does that! When is it time to put out an automated check to pasture.
- Data handling. Automation runs off your system data, we'll look at a couple of strategies.
- The perfect symbiosis. How do automation and manual testing work best together? We'll explore this, and how automation is not the enemy of manual testing.
References
I've read countless articles on automation, and held numerous conversations on the subject. So I'm not able to share every resource I've used fairly, however these are some key ones that I keep coming back to, and which are used throughout this series,
Blogs
- Just because you can automate everything ... doesn't mean you should: My experiences using automation on Project Case.
- Denial 103: But we spent a lot of money developing our automation: The fallacious thinking that because everyone else has automation, we need automation.
- Experiences in automation ... WeTestWorkshop: Wellington workshop on Katrina Clokie's experiences in using automation.
- Testing Vs Checking, Testing Vs Checking Refined, We Use Tools: Three articles on automation from Michael Bolton and James Bach
Books
- Lessons Learned In Software Testing: Cem Kaner, James Bach, Bret Pettichord. Chapter 5 on automation testing really highlights a lot of the pitfalls
- Agile Testing & More Agile Testing: Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory, I think the automation strategy detailed in especially the first book is excellent.
I've found that combining the ideas of these two books really useful for being aware of problems, and building a strategy that is as solid as you can make it.
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