QA Test Automation: Preface

Test Automation Preface.

Lately, I've become more involved in the process of automating the QA in their work, so I wanted to talk a little bit about what QA for me and why I want it as much as possible to automate. Just want to mention that all of what I write concerns agile processes, but the idea can be carried over to the traditional methodology.

For whom these articles? For all agile team as a whole, as the quality of the product in the agile process is the task of the whole team, without exception.

To begin with, what is QA. Here is a quote:

Software quality assurance is an integral part of the entire software development process – monitoring and improving the process, making sure that any agreed-upon standards and procedures are followed, and focuses on the prevention of system errors.

In other words, QA is the process whereby everything from requirements gathering to support the running application is done qualitatively. And, it is obvious that it is the task of the team.

What challenges encountered when involved in the process QA:

• collection and maintenance requirements (regardless of how management);
• management and support environment (base server);
• writing test cases, user-story and so on;
• writing and Running various tests (unit, performance, integration, etc.);
• writing code;
• application delivery to the end customer;
• ....

Since this never happens that all the work necessarily addictive, fun, intense and creative, then at some point will begin to appear boring and the same type of tasks that should be automated, and that there is time for a fascinating, exciting, intense, but you get .

So, what can be automated (from personal experience):

• unit- launch and integration-tests written by developers after the commit (like CI);
• testing database (also CI);
• installation of the application on the target server (the ideal interface with one-click "Install");
• assembly installation pack just in one click, with the inclusion of documentation, manuals and other pleasures;
• compile and disseminate statistics code (Clover, Cobertura supported by Sonar for java-developers)
• run regression tests;
• of a report on the results of the test (including tracing bug-tracker and other media tracking test cases);
• monitoring the "health" of an application and the early detection of diseases.

And a number of funny things.

By itself, that all these activities should be closely related to each other, to get a clear picture of the situation on the project, and not an abstract canvas.

Respectively, which I'll explain in the following posts:

• let us consider some CI servers, tell you about their chips and how they can be used outside the box;
• I'll write a couple of posts about what a nice thing bunch TestNG + WebDriver (Selenium 2);
• open a separate post reports and their generation in a pleasant way;
• tell you about the health of the application page and manageability.

And all of this will be in the context of java deploying.