Automated Testing

TWO extreme version of testing I witnessed in 2017, one a Start-Up disrupting markets and other a large enterprise that is part of the economic bedrock of a country.

1. Programmers work in pairs, the development cycle starts with a prioritized list, when it comes to making a code change, one person is at the keyboard while the other is an empathetic back seat driver, they ask questions, share ideas and occasionally change who is behind the wheels.

By the time their code can be run locally, automated tests have been deployed, as the change is merged into the source code repository, the full test suite has already run and come back green. As soon as the automated tests pass, the finished product is ready to shit to production. This cycles repeats several times every day.

• There is no Tester
• There are no hand-off between roles, no back-and-forth when a bug is found
• No last minute checks run before a push to production every 2 weeks
• Code goes to production daily, or even several times a day, per pair.

Getting to this point requires architecture, micro-services, build and deploy systems, roll back tooling, monitoring, and plenty of automation.

2. Release schedules are close to quarterly, the development team spends close to 10 weeks of each release cycles building a combination of new features and lingering bugs from the last release.

The combination of the product architecture and technical stack result in a number of defects, often unpredictable and unrelated to the most recent change.

This is where the Test Automation Engineer steps in, running his test suit on the test environments overnight, posting failed results by sunrise.

The exploratory testers step in, running the failed tests to observe what happened, and then perform typical follow-up testing techniques of switching behaviour, data, versions, browsers, etc to more effectively report on the bug.

Report to the programmer and move onto the next bug, work on refactoring some tests, or build new tests.

2018 Trends to Watch Out

Quality Engineering over Quality Testing — Testing becomes more progressive, iterative and integrated with the app making process from start.

Agile & DevOps merge — Role of Test CoE will change as test automation developers are increasingly part of the agile teams. Eventually merging the roles of a QA tester and developer.

Other notable ones include: Merger of QA and Developer roles, open source tools that specialize in particular areas, shift from performance testing to performance engineering, rise in IoT and Big Data test practices.

Tech Mahindra is ready to accept these changes in the year ahead with a comprehensive framework to automate and enable all aspects of testing life cycle and offer it as-a-Service or have you pick modular solutions to deploy and run.

LitmusT (Intelligent Test Automation Platform) from Tech Mahindra

An API based Architecture, Open Source Tech, Cloud Enabled, Zero Touch, Machine Learning, Log Analytics & Predictive Capabilities, Hyper Automation, Chat Bots, Dev-QA-Ops, Visual Dashboards and number of home grown IPs for automated script-less execution framework and engine.