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The potential of Test Automation is huge. Dependencies to requirement specifications change requests and project deadlines significantly impact the success of Test Automation. Insufficient fulfilment of prerequisites often provides huge barriers to the automated execution of test cases in software projects.
Challenges for test automators
Test Automation comes with the promise of improving efficiency and overcoming existing challenges in software testing, making the Test Automator the hero of both testers and managers. However, (i) insufficiently formulated requirements, (ii) frequent changes in requirements and software architecture, as well as (iii) time pressure when project deadlines approach make application of Test Automation in software development projects very difficult.
Test Automators spend a huge amount of their working time with (i) chasing stakeholders to gain information required to automate test cases and (ii) adapting their testing programs to keep them up to date.
This effort, weighed against the increased efficiency created by automated test execution, dramatically reduces profitability of Test Automation approaches, often making the test automator more of a burden than a hero in software development projects.
Approaches, such as Model Based Testing, Automated Test Case Generation or Automated End-To-end Testing, are required in order to overcome these challenges and make automation in software testing profitable.
What can be done to overcome these challenges?
To overcome time pressure when project deadlines approach, we can decouple the implementation of unit tests with the modeling of test cases and the underlying requirements. Model based testing approaches help to decouple these constraints. The Test-Model can be done with stake holders.
With devmate for example the test model can be created by the stakeholder alone without any programming knowledge needed.
Model based testing also give us the opportunity to generate test code from the model automatically. Which saves up to 75% of unit test development time.
(1)Book „Basiswissen Modellbasierter Test“ https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/basiswissen-modellbasiertertest/9781457184833/ch02.html#ch02lev1sec03
(2) Article “How To Do Automated Regression Testing” https://www.sealights.io/blog/bestpractices-in-automated-regression-testing/
(3)Article “Insights into Regression Testing”: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/65194
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Daniel Lehner is a PhD student at the Johannes Keppler University in Linz, Austria. His research focus is on traceability of software information between different stages in the development cycle. During his master studies in Business Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology, Daniel worked as a consultant in the area of software quality assurance.
Towards a new generation of test types
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Daniel Lehner