Test & Automation Consulting, LLC

Software Test Automation: Architectures and Advanced Techniques

Course Description

Your organization has decided that test automation is a good idea. You bought the commercial automation tool, taken the 3 day course that purports to teach you how to use the tool. So what do you do now?

Many organizations start the long paved path to automation hell by starting to create scripts using the Record / Playback mechanism supplied by the tool. Your automation program is now officially dead; it just doesn't know it yet. This common problem is understandable; the tool vendor sold it as an R/P tool.

This one day course can help prevent your organization from falling prey to the natural result of good intentions. What the tool vendors often neglect to mention is that your brand new automation tool is really a programming language with some attached bells and whistles. As a programming language, it is essential that the organization treat the automation project as what it really is: a software development project. This fact has many strategic repercussions which are discussed in this class.

Does this mean that every person involved in the automation project needs to be a developer and have programming skills? Absolutely not, if you structure your team right. It simply means that you need to understand how to structure the team, the tests, and the architecture that supports the automation.

During the class, Jamie will present many proven examples of test automation creation techniques. Where possible, scripting examples are presented in pseudo code which can be adapted to many of the most popular automation tools. Emphasis is placed on teaching innovative techniques for increasing the positive ROI of the automation program. Common automation problems are discussed and solutions are presented for overcoming them. Some of the topics which will be presented are extending the toolset through tool and non-tool development, error handling and fault tolerance, effective logging, solutions through patterns, and handling failures through a "learning architecture."

The course, Software Test Automation: Principles of Success, is not a required prerequisite to this course, but would be helpful to attendees. It describes many of the rationales for why we make the choices we do when creating the automation architecture and infrastructure as described in this course.

You will

  • Learn what automation architecture is and why you need it.
  • Understand the several most commonly used architectures and when they should be chosen.
  • Be exposed to an extended example of structuring automation successfully.
  • Discover the programming patterns that solve most of the issues that pop up in automation.
  • Learn how to extend the automation tool set to customize the automation project for maximum ROI.
  • Receive a custom DLL and source code, written by the instructor, to extend many popular automation tools.

Who should attend?

This course is for all test team members who hope to become automators. The course may be taught with code examples if the attendees have a technical background. The code examples may be skipped for a less technical audience, if desired. The concepts will still be valuable for attendees.

Format

While this course is mainly a lecture course, all attempts are made to get the attendees to discuss their own experiences with automation - both successes and failures.

Course Outline

  1. Automation Architectures
  2. Dealing with complexity
  3. Development hierarchy
  4. Standards and guidelines
  5. Test cases as assets
  6. Infrastructure
  7. Extended example: Brick architecture
  8. Template Functions
  9. Variable scoping
  10. Fault Tolerance
  11. Error Handling
  12. QARun type
  13. WinRunner Type
  14. Synchronization
  15. Logistics
  16. How to run the tests
  17. Logging
  18. Built In
  19. External
  20. Automation Library
  21. Function types
  22. Extending the tool set
  23. Patterns
  24. Persistent data
  25. Location Check
  26. Control Interaction
  27. Learning architecture
  28. Single Action While Loop
  29. Expected behavior
  30. Web testing
  31. Add screen by screen functions
  32. Data input screens

Bio

Jamie Mitchell: Owner and Principal Consultant / Test & Automation Consulting LLC

Jamie Mitchell brings over 25 years of testing experience, both hardware and software, to his test automation company. Mr. Mitchell is a true pioneer in the test automation field. He has been working with a variety of test automation tools since the first Windows tools were released with Windows 3.0. He has written test tools for several platforms; for Windows, he has developed the Test - Automation Programming Interface (T-API), a leading edge test automation solution that increases the flexibility, ease of use, and ROI of automated tools.

In his role as Principal Consultant at Test & Automation Consulting LLC, Jamie Mitchell is responsible for developing and implementing test automation initiatives for a range of clients. In addition, Mr. Mitchell also provides training, mentoring, and expert technical support.

Jamie is the former Director of The International Institute for Software Testing, the Lead Automation Engineer for American Express Distributed Integration Test (lab) / Worldwide, and has successfully architected and implemented test automation projects for many top companies including American Express, Mayo Clinic, IBM AS/400 division, ShowCase Corporation and others.

Mr. Mitchell holds a Master of Computer Science degree from Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA. He holds the Certified Software Test Engineer certification from QAI. He is a charter member of the Austin Workshop on Test Automation, and a regular speaker at several international conferences, including SQE, QAI and PSQT.