Anyone involved in a QA project understands the competing pressures of delivering high quality business applications and the business realities of schedule pressures, cost and resource constraints, along with the need to balance the risks associated with the decision matrix that these competing issues force. We all know how a project timeline works; the QA function is generally afforded the appropriate timeline in the original project plan, but inevitable delays in the process squeeze the time and often the available resources for QA at the end of the project. This results in a set of decisions around delivering the project late or limiting the QA process to a subset of the desired test scenarios, creating a balancing act with project realities and business risk. These trade-offs occur in most projects.
Today’s test automation tools still have a lot of “manual” in the automation, limiting just how much QA can be accomplished in a given time span, regardless of how many resources are thrown at the problem. Developing scripts is a manual process that requires substantial specialized skills, access to people who understand the application and the business processes to be tested. Then, of course, there is the ongoing challenge of maintaining and updating the script libraries that are in place, a process that never really goes away. Most companies never get beyond 20% – 30% automation as the effort to maintain test libraries slowly consumes the resources intended for automation creation.
Scriptless Testing changes this dynamic entirely. By completely eliminating the manual steps in script creation and maintenance, effectively “automating the automation”, it is now possible to significantly expand test coverage, develop and update intelligent test cases rapidly, and engage the business analysts and subject matter experts into the business validation process without the need to engage a technical resource to support them. The result is a more responsive QA performed at a much lower overall cost…effectively ending the time/cost/risk trade-offs that have hampered QA teams everywhere. Expanded application coverage, faster automation delivery, lower cost…what’s not to love?!
In the Orasi & TurnKey webinar on May 1st, the audience learned how TurnKey Scriptless Testing extends the power of HP ALM to provide a more intelligent approach to automated testing. To access the recording for this webinar, please click here.
