Intelligent Test Automation
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started hands-on testing immediately,
and found some nice bugs. The development
team happily fixed these bugs, and gave
Tester 1 a fresh version of the software to test.
More testing, more bugs, more fixes.
Tester 1 felt productive, and was happy—at
least for a while.
After several rounds of this find-and-fix cycle,
he became bored and bleary-eyed from running
virtually the same tests over and over again by
hand. When Tester 1 finally ran out of enthusiasm—
and then out of patience—the software
was declared “ready to ship.”
Customers found it too buggy and bought
the competitor’s product.
started testing by hand, but soon decided
it made more sense to create test scripts that
would perform the keystrokes automatically. After
carefully figuring out tests that would exercise useful
parts of the software, Tester 2 recorded the actions in
scripts. These scripts soon numbered in the hundreds.
At the push of a button, the scripts would
spring to life and run the software through its paces.
Tester 2 felt clever, and was happy—at least for
a while.
The scripts required a lot of maintenance when
the software changed. He spent weeks arguing
with developers to stop changing the software because
it broke the automated tests. Eventually,
the scripts required so much maintenance that
there was little time left to do testing.
When the software was released,
customers found lots of bugs that the
scripts didn’t cover. They stopped buying
the product and decided to wait for
version 2.0.
didn’t want to maintain hundreds of automated
test scripts. She wrote a test program that went around randomly
clicking and pushing buttons in the application. This “random”
test program was hypnotic to watch, and it found a lot of crashing
bugs.
Tester 3 enjoyed uncovering such dramatic defects,
and was happy—at least for a while.
Since the random test program could only
find bugs that crashed the application, Tester 3
still had to do a lot of hands-on testing, getting
bored and bleary-eyed in the process. Customers
found so many functional bugs in the
software when it was released that they lost
trust in the company and stopped buying its
software.
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