As software projects become larger and more complex, how can you ensure that you maintain a high-quality delivery every time? How can you limit the number of defects released into your production systems?

That’s why it is important to have dedicated testing teams, to ensure that release code is comprehensively and thoroughly checked against a large number of possible scenarios. The job of the tester is often not glamorous, but it is vital to the success of any project. When you have a team of strong, experienced testing professionals, you are already well on your way to shipping defect-free code.

However, when it comes to large, complex projects, the testing load can often grow quickly. If the development methodology is agile or iterative with frequent releases, the amount of regression testing can soon swamp the testing team.

So what’s the solution? The best idea is to automate as much testing as possible – freeing up the time of your testing team to focus on key areas such as critical system functionality, usability testing and testing new features.

However, while fine on paper, there are a number of practical challenges when you start to move towards automation testing.

“I don’t have time to develop automation testing”

Automation testing is definitely not the right fit for every scenario. It is best utilized for repetitive, core testing tasks – the things that need to be regression tested for every release, for example.

The initial work to develop the testing scripts and framework needs to be carefully assessed and compared against the rewards. You’re looking for an effort curve like the chart below, where we can clearly see the initial effort required to create the automation test is paid back in future releases. If the initial ‘hump’ to develop the automation testing is too large, the number of scenarios to which you can apply it is reduced.

“I want to use automation testing, but my testers don’t have the coding experience”

This is a common problem in many development projects. The mindset and skill set of the tester and developer are very different – a great tester is not necessarily a great developer and vice versa. Your manual testers may simply lack the experience (or confidence) to take on writing automation scripts.

The Solution

A solution that can break down both of these barriers is an automation framework that allows your testers to create automated test scripts through a simple Excel spreadsheet without having to write any code. A tool that allows you to deploy automated testing scripts quickly to reduce the development ‘hump’ we saw in the chart above.

At Bleum, we have developed such a tool, and find it valuable on a number of projects.

A simple interface allows the tester to quickly and easily generate automation scripts.
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Takeaway

If you want to empower your testing teams and embrace the benefits of automation testing, deploying a “no scripting” test automation framework is an excellent choice.

Contact us today to organize a demonstration of our “no scripting” test automation tool.