‘Test Automation’ has I fear, become a phrase rather than two individual words. A few seconds thought highlights that each of these words has separate and even competing meanings. ‘Test’ is the objective while ‘Automation’ is simply a means to an end.
Or to put it another way. You are faced with a considerable challenge of ensuring that before they go live, that applications are of the necessary quality to support the business. The only way to ensure that this is the case is to thoroughly test each application.
But manual testing is tedious and slow and it is almost impossible to use a manual approach for a full regression test. So the world turned to test automation.
Frankly they’d have turned to ‘Test Magic’ or ‘Test Rocket’ if that would have met the objective of testing faster and better. But the need is to test.
Sadly almost every tool vendor and outsourcer has ignored this word and has solely focused on ‘Automation’. The objective has been almost forgotten in the euphoria of navigating through an application from ‘A’ to ‘Z’. This isn’t testing, or if you must, it’s a smoke test at best.
You wanted a full regression test pack where not only do you navigate through the application from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ but that every screen element, including every row/column in every table) is extracted and compared to a baseline. You want to be told about every difference and have the ability to flag whether these were expected or not.
Try asking your test automation team how long that will take. Then please try asking us.
