Tuesday 6 July 2010

Why automate your test cases?


Where this, maybe even very basic question came from? I talked with my old schoolmate and he had had a hard time to prove to his boss why they should automate some of their test cases. They are doing regression tests that people are executing before every release. To me it seemed like a very simple case, to automate what they were doing.

So why should test cases be automated? Feedback time is the key. With testing you are trying to find (and also trying to avoid) defects as soon as it has been presented to the code. With manual regression testing, this feedback loop is long and regression testing itself is time consuming which causes a problem in test coverage. With automation, you can have bigger set of test executed with shorter time and after creating good Continuous Integration system, there is no need of human interaction for regression test execution.

You can sleep your nights better, with good test automation. Because with it, you know all the time where you are with your Software.

Ps. You can find some Automation testing tools here.

Automation frameworks: Robot framework, Cucumber and Fitnnesse.
Continuous Integration Servers: Hudson and BuildBot

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