You may have built that application in-house, you may have purchased a COTS application like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce, or you may be consuming that application in the cloud.
However acquired, the fact is that the application will comprise millions of lines of code and will have taken many man-years to build.
Testing the application will be a major undertaking, and thoughts will logically turn to how test automation can lighten the load and speed the process.
Now at this point, you may want to sit down and possibly have a strong drink in your hand or whatever you turn to when you feel troubled as I feel your mood will darken as I name the miscreants behind the almost unbelievable state in which we find ourselves.
IBM, Micro Focus (HP as was), the open-source folk at Selenium and almost every test automation vendor share the same cunning approach. What they all suggest is that to test the millions of lines of code in the application and which represents many man-years of effort, is that …
Wait for it …
You should write many more lines of code, and invest many man-years of effort to create a test automation framework. It gets worse. Once constructed, this test automation framework will do no more than navigate through your application and maybe compare the odd value that appears on a screen.
Take another swig because the bad news just goes on and on.
If (in the unlikely event you understand) that the application under test should change, an upgrade perhaps or even the odd enhancement, the chances are that the test automation framework will stop working. More lines of code and more months of effort will be needed just to get back to where you were.
And the final strand that turns mere craziness into full-blown insanity is that tools are now starting to appear to test code coverage – not of the application under test but the test automation framework that you’ve built. Perhaps we need something to automate the testing of the test automation framework?
The world seems to have forgotten that we turned to test automation to lighten the load and speed the process, but that seems to have been forgotten.
You didn’t want to automate for the sake of it; you just wanted to test faster and better.
When you’re feeling stronger, give me a call, and we can talk about code-free test automation.
Colin Armitage is the CEO of Original Software
