Test Center Automation

Why Test Center Automation is Critical

Why test? It’s about confidence. The development and testing phase of an application can have a significant impact on the overall cost and time to market for a software product. Poorly tested applications can result in expensive and time-consuming back-out plans and outages.

Why test center automation? Project managers are continually encouraged to reduce costs and reduce overall test cycle times while delivering more comprehensive test coverage. These conflicting goals mean that you need to find the most efficient ways to perform your job. Automation can help accomplish these goals. Automating the build and repurposing of test assets allows you to both reduce the cost of hardware, software and test infrastructure management, and improve quality by creating a near replica of your production environment.

The Challenges of Testing

• Creating test infrastructure systems that are similar to the production systems.
• Creating a test environment that can simulate the scalability of production.
• Building test systems each time a new fix is released and needs to be retested.
• The waterfall model – a dangerous development practice that leaves all QA to the end of a project. QA time allotment is further compressed by unexpected schedule slips.
• Poor unit testing is frustrating for QA teams, as they often cause road-blocking defects – defects that should have been found earlier, and are not impeding other integrated tests.
• Schedule Slips. No QA team ever really has the time they need to do the job they want!