Test Automation Case Study

A large financial services company owns 10 licenses for HP's Quick Test Pro test tool and 10 licenses for MicroFocus's Test Partner test tool.

This company first started trying to automate some of their testing about seven years ago. At this time, all their testing is manual. There are, however, about 5,000 test scripts written in QTP and 1,000 written in Test Partner.

Over the past seven years, there have been three CIOs and five test department managers. The department has never had any kind of training in software testing or test tools.

There is no one in charge of using the tools and the department has no documented test processes. So, the tool versions have not been updated in over two years.

A new CIO has just been hired. One of her top priorities is to improve the quality of releases. Users and customers often complain that new releases have too many problems. Some of the issues are things that were fixed in past releases.

A new test manager was brought in from a company who had been successful in automating about 50% of their tests. The CIO has given the new test manager her full support in getting the funding and people to restart the test automation effort. The CIO would like to see some results from the automation effort in six months or less, which is when the next major release is distributed.

There are 20 people in the test department besides the manager. Ten of these people have over 10 years testing experience. Five of the people have less than five years experience and five people are entry-level people. None of the test team have any coding skills.

The main application is PC-based, but the future direction is to make the application web-based.

Major Tool Requirements

  1. The tool must run in the Windows XP and Windows 7 environments.
  2. The tool must be easy to use by the test team.
  3. The tool must have good vendor support, including training.
  4. The tool's scripting language must be open (such as VB Script) to allow scripts to be executed by other tools.
  5. The tool must recognize Windows objects and access Windows API
  6. The tool must support web testing
Last modified: Friday, 9 July 2010, 2:52 PM