Quick Dirty Disposable automation



Here are some interesting things that I have tried recently changing the way automation is done traditionally.

What to automate?
  1. The most difficult question though it sounds pretty straight forward
  2. If you already have manual tests have your battle is won
  3. If not run through the most used features / easily broken 
  4. Take leads from the sitemaps / access logs / Roles / analytics and access statistics
Start automating?
  1. Biggest challenge is always maintenance , categorise tests into essential features and generic
  2. What we also categorise tests into are " will there be an upgrade or not?" - so we have two sets quick dirty disposable tests and well designed unbreakable tests.
  3. Everything flows from QDD to WDU tests
  4. The first script is always a bootstrap script that will have the initialization parameters in place
By now you would have realised this is an unorthodox way and might be debatable with some test automation experts, the reason being we are ignoring the rules
The advantages:
  1. If the tests are just required for an upgrade then why make the tests so stable, quick brittle tests should do
  2. Number of automated tests churned in a day much higher than usual
  3. The QDD (Quick Dirty Disposable) tests are actually not disposed but used later if required to convert them to WDU tests
  4. Manual testers can use these tests which will give them the time to actually concentrate on the core functionality being tested

This definitely doesn't mean that we have the license for bad automation practices.Do not spend time to write quick and dirty tests for applications with a long lifespan.

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