Quality Goes Bananas
By: Rex Black, Daniel Derr and Michael Tyszkiewicz
The most important quality risks we
wanted to address were:
• Reliability
• Translation completeness
• Functionality of UI
• Input error checking
• Verification of requirements
The automation tool needed to do the
following:
• Address defined risks
• Produce accurate form-flow diagrams
• Reduce tedium and opportunity for
error in manual testing
• Save effort associated with manual
testing for these risks
• Improve time-to-market by
reducing test cycle duration
through 24x7 testing
• Provide auditable documentation
• Handle any screen flow or translation
without custom test scripts (i.e., be
trial-independent)
• Be easy to implement
• Be cost effective
This is a case study in how we reduced
our risks and achieved our test automation
objectives in just a few months on a
total outlay of $0 for tools. Now, it wasn’t
as if we started with zero cost as a target.
Often, buying tools is the most cost-effective
solution, so we evaluated test automation
tools as a potential solution. Since we
were developing custom software on a
hand-held device, we found the commercial
options limited. ePRO-LOG is highly
configurable and optimized to make
diaries easy to produce. The drawback of
our approach was that our widgets were
non standard, and are therefore not handled
gracefully by common testing tools.
We also needed an easy way to generate
screen flows and compare those with our
requirements.
We had hit a dead end. We couldn’t
find a commercial tool to meet our needs
and human labor was cost prohibitive.
That’s when the monkey came into the
picture; a Dumb Monkey to be precise.
Why is the Monkey dumb? Because the
architecture is so simple. The Monkey is an
unscripted automated test tool that provides
input at random. To minimize cost, effort,
and time required for development, we
implemented the Monkey in Perl under
Cygwin. We also took advantage of our application’s
cross-platform functionality and performed
the bulk of our testing on a Window
Every test automation tool tends to have
its own terminology, so let’s start by introducing
some terms
Full article...
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