Teaching test automation & performance testing

I was asked to share some knowledge on test automation and load and performance testing by Polteq. The company is running a “Special Development Program” in which employees from all levels of the company, ranging from junior engineers to senior consultants, get the opportunity to follow trainings and courses in a range of things. Varying from social skills to hard technical skills. It is the latter I have been asked to help provide some training for, which I do gladly.

There is however quite a challenge, as said, the audience ranges from junior to quite senior, but also from technically strong to technically challenged (my apologies to all the colleagues I am insulting with this statement, but I know you can forgive me:) ). So how do I go about preparing two trainings, one about test automation and one about load and performance testing, for such a diverse group? The duration of these sessions is also quite limited, making it even more difficult to come up with something sane to do in these evenings.

Oh! To make my life easier, I have been telling everyone, during a bunch of company meetings and updates over the past month, I do not believe sitting back and listening to someone broadcasting the information will help in learning something to do with technical skills.

The trainings need to be interactive, but also guided and somewhat personalized. Thus far I have come up with the idea of preparing a bunch of USB sticks with a set of portable applications I use regularly to automate stuff with. When in this context I say automate, I really mean hack something together which does the job and at the end of the project (or my involvement with the project) gets thrown away. Do I indeed want to teach the habit of writing throw-away-code?

On top of that, do I want to teach some “technical” or basic programing skills based on examples with tools, which should in their own right not be used to automate these things? Actually, I believe I do! My goal for these evenings will be to get this group excited to use and abuse tools to their own advantage! The tools I already chose, now I need to figure out some interesting, useful and enjoyable targets for these people to hack their way around. Tips anyone?

Posted by

Martijn de Vrieze

Posted on

April 23, 2012

Posted under

Test automation

Comments

7 Comments

Throw-away test automation

I quite often tell clients that their approach to test automation is not sustainable, this got me thinking, does test automation always have to be sustainable and reusable?

This all depends on the goal you’re trying to meet I guess. If your goal is set for long-term cost efficiency, shorten the timelines on regression testing and through that get to a more rapid release cycle, yes you will need to be focussed on the re-usability of your automation suite.

However there are plenty of instances where you want to automate something to make life easier right here, right now. Most testers, I hope, know the feeling of having to go through tedious, repetitive work, setting up data for a test, going through the login flow of an application to get to the feature you want to test etc. For actions like that, you can very well use automation. In fact, you can quite often use the most simple form of automation, record/playback without having to adjust your scripts for maintainability or re-usability.

Tools like Selenium IDE and AutoIt are excellent for making life easy right here, right now when you need to quickly automate something to make life easy. Funnily enough a lot of testers either do not realize these tools can be used to make life easier. When talking with colleagues about test automation they quite often think of big test automation packages, like QTP or Rational Robot. Sometimes they ask how much you need to know of software development and writing code to automate things. And most of these conversations I let myself be sucked into the tool talks and indeed talk about the difficulties of setting up a test automation framework.

In future conversations I am going to try to explain my colleagues and fellow testers that automation does not need to be a big operation, it doesn’t need to be reusable and maintainable, at least, depending on your goals. As long as your goal is to make life easy here and now, there is no need to build something awesome.

For a lot of things, a simple script, either hand written or simply recorded, can be more than enough to get to your goal, when done with your tasks you can then throw them away, but preferably be a bit smart about it and just dump it somewhere in a repository, you might have to do this task again.