The Real Costs/Benefits of Test Automation

Are you frustrated with vendors of test automation tools that do not tell you the whole story about what it takes to automate testing? Are you tired of trying to implement test automation without breaking the bank and without overloading yourself with work? I experienced first-hand why people find test automation difficult, and I developed …

What Is Test Automation Return on Investment?

What is the Automation ROI ticker? The LogiGear Automation Return on Investment (ROI) ticker, the set of colored numbers that you see above the page, shows how much money we presumably save our customers over time by employing test automation as compared to doing those same tests manually, both at the design and execution level.

Automation Adoption

One of the basic challenges with test automation is adoption. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cataloged licenses for a company and found out they already have many different automation software packages, none of which is being used. Traditionally I’ve been told that is because the tools don’t work and that the teams …

My Attempt to Clarify My “Everything” Statement

I got some comments on my post “Test Everything all the Time” — most notably people commenting that it’s impossible to test “everything”. I can’t agree more. The intention of the post was to make the point that we need to be able to test “everything we can” all the time. That is, you should …

Giving an Atomic Bomb to a Caveman…

The challenges with any automation effort is to know your capability. I’ve seen too many automation efforts begin and end with a tool decision. Generally these tools are very complex pieces of software that do many more things then we would ever use in our normal everyday testing. It even adds more misery to the …

Four Software Testing Challenges We Must Repeatedly Overcome

I recently came back from the Software Testing & Evaluation Summit in Washington, DC hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association. The objective of the workshop is to help recommend policy and guidance changes to the Defense enterprise, focusing on improving practice and productivity of software testing and evaluation (T&E) approaches in Defense acquisition.

Successful Automation of Cloud Testing

The Cloud demands that we be as nimble as possible, delivering features and fixes in almost real-time fashion. Both customer and provider rely on software development that can maintain quality while being light on its feet and constantly moving. In addition, Cloud-oriented systems tend to be highly complex and dynamic in structure — more than …

Software Test Automation: Divide and Conquer

Divide and conquer was a strategy successfully employed by ancient Persian kings against their Greek enemies. It is a strategy that can still be used successfully today. Fundamentally, by dividing something into smaller more manageable pieces (in the case of the ancient Persians, they divided the Greek city states), it becomes much more manageable.