Experiences of Test Automation: Case Studies of Software Test Automation

Software test automation has moved beyond a luxury to become a necessity. Applications and systems have grown ever larger and more complex, and manual testing simply cannot keep up. As technology changes, and more organizations move into agile development, testing must adapt--and quickly. Test automation is essential, but poor automation is wasteful--how do you know where your efforts will take you?

Authors Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster wrote the field's seminal text, Software Test Automation, which has guided many organizations toward success. Now, in Experiences of Test Automation, they reveal test automation at work in a wide spectrum of organizations and projects, from complex government systems to medical devices, SAP business process development to Android mobile apps and cloud migrations. This book addresses both management and technical issues, describing failures and successes, brilliant ideas and disastrous decisions and, above all, offers specific lessons you can use.

Coverage includes

• Test automation in agile development
• How management support can make or break successful automation
• The importance of a good testware architecture and abstraction levels
• Measuring benefits and Return on Investment (ROI)
• Management issues, including skills, planning, scope, and expectations
• Model-Based Testing (MBT), monkey testing, and exploratory test automation
• The importance of standards, communication, documentation, and flexibility in enterprise-wide automation
• Automating support activities
• Which tests to automate, and what not to automate
• Hidden costs of automation: maintenance and failure analysis
• The right objectives for test automation: why "finding bugs" may not be a good objective
• Highlights, consisting of lessons learned, good points, and helpful tips

Experiences of Test Automation will be invaluable to everyone considering, implementing, using, or managing test automation. Testers, analysts, developers, automators and automation architects, test managers, project managers, QA professionals, and technical directors will all benefit from reading this book.

Dorothy Graham is a world-renowned consultant, speaker, and author with nearly forty years of experience in software testing. After nineteen years with Grove Consultants, she now concentrates on conferences and writing. She was Programme Chair for the 1993 and 2009 EuroSTAR conferences and holds the European Excellence Award in Software Testing. Mark Fewster has thirty years of software testing and automation experience. As developer and manager for a multi-platform graphical application, he designed an architecture for long-lasting test automation. With Grove Consultants since 1993, he provides training and consultancy in all aspects of software testing. Graham and Fewster coauthored the popular book Software Test Automation (Addison-Wesley, 1999).

Contributed chapter lead authors include Lisa Crispin, Henri van de Scheur, Ken Johnston, Bo Roop, John Kent, Ane Clausen, Elfriede Dustin, Alan Page, Stefan Mohacsi, Simon Mills, Jason Weden, Bryan Bakker, Antti Jääskeläinen, Christoph Mecke, Björn Boisschot, Michael Williamson, Lars Wahlberg, Jonathan Kohl, Albert Farré Benet, Seretta Gamba, Wim Demey, Ursula Friede, John Fodeh, Mike Baxter, Ross Timmerman, Ed Allen, and Harry Robinson.