Connecting Practice

Archive for the ‘211214. Tool’ Category.

5 Activities of Automation Process

4th July 2011, 03:12 pm

This piece details an automation processes and workflows. The purpose is to define and describe in detail the automation process. The intended audiences of this piece are any internal personal wishing to use the automation process. Below are 5 activities of automation process.

1. Define Automation Coverage
(Purpose: Identify appropriate focus of the automation effort.)

Responsibility
The QA Lead is responsible for defining the Automation Request and/or test details about the functionality of the application under test. The Automation Lead is responsible for making decision as to whether it is feasible to automate the automation Requests defined by the QA Lead.

1.1. What to Automate?
The Automation Lead will obtain and examine the Automation Request document to identify and eliminate incomplete, unclear, incorrect, and ambigious words, phrases, and constructs.

Note: The Automation Request document should be well defined. By reason of, an incomplete, unclear, incorrect, and ambigious words, phrases, and constructs within the Automation Request will lead to assume automation work direction. This would impact the automation design, planning, implementation, and results.

The Automation Lead should ask “What” most of the time. The intention is to understand the Automation Request and improve quality of the document for better automation design, planning, implementation, and results.

1.2. How to Automate?
The Automation Lead will then produce an Automation Design document. This design document will detail how many test scripts are to be created for each section of functionality that is to be automated.

The Automation Lead and the QA Lead must decide on what sections of functionality of the application will be automated.

Below are some automation criteria.

a. The test cases that test the sections are run most frequently. These test cases are more suitable for automation than tests that are rarely run.
b. The automation of sections of functionality should take longer not than manual testing. If this is not feasible, the coverage of the automation should be reduced.

1.3. How to Prioritize?
Priorities for automation should be agreed weekly at the sprint meeting.

Note: Priority List will be prepared by the Automation Lead. This includes review results from previous week’s actual automation task list. What was achieved, what wasn’t (and why), and what was achieved that wasn’t on the initial list (and why) would be highlighted in the sprint meeting.

2. Plan Automation
(Purpose: Create the Automation Plan and identify how long it will take to automate each test script as defined in the automation coverage and when the completion date will be.)

Responsibility
The Automation Lead is responsible for creating the Automation Plan and estimating the effort required to automate each test script as defined in the automation coverage. The QA Lead is responsible for approving the Automation Plan.

2.1. Create Automation Plan
The Automation Lead will describe, organize, and finalize the automation objectives (task completion criteria) with all automation team members. This includes:

a. allocating and delegating tasks and/or activities to all automation team members;
b. facilitating and/or collaborating with all automation team members for agreement, ideas development, information development, mutual understanding, utilization, and decision making; and
c. participating in learning automation activities as a learner and as a mentor.

Note: Any recommendations, assumptions, risks, and exceptions are highlighted in Automation Plan document. While issues and/or concerns should be addressed, confronted, and reinforced in assessing readiness to engage in the process.

2.2. Estimate Schedule
This estimation is broken down into the effort required for each test script development task which adds up to give a total effort in man-hours. The estimation should include start and end dates for each test script development task as well as a total percentage of automation completion.

The Automation Lead and the QA Lead must sign off on what will be implemented in the Automation Plan so there will be no misunderstandings when the Automation Plan is implemented.

3. Implement Automation
(Purpose: Record progress, hold a meeting, create test scripts, create test data, create test artifacts, run test scripts, and generate report with all automation team members.)

Responsibility
It is the responsibility of the Automation Lead to ensure that their automation team is aware of their tasks and timelines and that they perform their testing according to the automation process.

3.1. Record Progress
The Automation Lead will record daily progress, delays, issues, and/or problems.

3.2. Hold a Meeting
The Automation Lead will hold a daily meeting with all automation team members to discuss status and any problems and/or issues that have arisen.

3.3. Create Test Scripts
The automation team will create the test scripts based on the automation design created in step one in accordance with the estimate schedule created in step two.

Test scripts should be created to automate the execution of test suite. Test suite in this context is a cohesive collection of most frequently used (proven and assumed) test cases.

Below are reusability advantage of most frequently used (proven and assumed) test cases:

a. allow future projects to make use of them.
b. ensure that time required for automation is being reduced.
c. minimize the creation of redundant test scripts.
d. improve the productivity of QA team.

The reuse of test scripts typically involves performing the following steps in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and/or time-boxed manner:

a. Identify potentially reusable test scripts.
b. Evaluate the potentially reusable test scripts for fitness for reuse.
c. Modify reusable test scripts (if necessary) for use.
d. Reuse the test scripts.

3.4. Create Test Data
The automation team will check and update the test data before execution of any test scripts so that accurate results will not be missed by improper test data.

Note: Test data is an input data that used a predefined data values. Usually the test data is a kind of file loaded for running the test scripts in this context.

3.5. Create Test Artifacts
The automation team will develop the Decision Table documents to:

a. provide high functional coverage of the automation requirements; and
b. produce the minimum number of test cases to reduce the amount of time needed to execute tests.

Note: Decision Table is a standardized way of describing test procedures. It is a tool to present clearly and concisely a system’s condition or combination of conditions. Also it is validated automatically against the test scripts.

3.6. Run Test Scripts
The automation team will work directly with the development team to verify, evaluate, and validate program against the test scripts to cause failures that can be used to identify defects.

Running the test scripts typically involves performing the following steps:

a. Stimulating the item under test.
b. Capture the actual test results.
c. Compare actual against expected results.
d. Monitor for test script bugs.

3.7. Generate Report
The Automation Lead will develop test execution report. This includes distributing the test execution report detailing the summary; escalating issues and/or concerns; and providing recommended solutions to problems to the relevant audiences.

4. Maintain Test Scripts
(Purpose: Maintain the test scripts on subsequent project releases and re-work areas where changes have been made to the project functionality.)

Responsibility
It is the responsibility of the automation team to maintain the test scripts on subsequent project releases and re-work areas where changes have been made to the project functionality. This maintenance will take place over the course of the Pre-{client name} releases.

4.1. Debug and Fix Test Scripts
The automation team should should debug and fix test scripts from bugs. Also the
automation team should ensure that any changes in the project are identified and the test scripts are updated to accommodate them.

5. Automation Handover
(Purpose: Fine tune test scripts to remove any outstanding problems on the first formal release of project; show how to run the scripts on the remaining formal releases; and hand over the test script to QA Team.)

Responsibility
It is the responsibility of the automation team to:

a. fine tune the test scripts to remove any outstanding problems on the first formal release;
b. show how to run the scripts on the remaining formal releases; and
c. hand over the test script to QA Team.

5.1. Fine Tune Test Scripts
The test scripts should be run against the first formal release and fine tuned to remove any outstanding issues that have arisen due to changes in the project.

5.2. Show How to Run the Test Scripts
The Automation Team will show the QA Team how to run the automation scripts so that they can run the scripts against the remaiming Formal Releases.

5.3. Handover to QA Team
The test scripts having been completed and tested sufficiently will be handed over to the QA Team. This would enable them to add to the test suite and thereby increase the number of test cases that are automated with each release cycle.

Moreover, the QA Team will also be trained and shown how to add test data to their scripts which enable them to change the focus of the test script by commenting out or removing certain test data if a piece of functionality is out of scope for the project or if there is a know issue in the release and the QA Team do not want to continually recreate that error.