Test Automation - What To Test

What To Test

Testing tools can help automate tasks such as product installation, test data creation, GUI interaction, problem detection (consider parsing or polling agents equipped with oracles), defect logging, etc., without necessarily automating tests in an end-to-end fashion.

One must keep satisfying popular requirements when thinking of test automation:

• Platform and OS independence
• Data driven capability (Input Data, Output Data, Metadata)
• Customizable Reporting (DB Access, crystal reports)
• Easy debugging and logging
• Version control friendly – minimal binary files
• Extensible & Customizable (Open APIs to be able to integrate with other tools)
• Common Driver (For example, in the Java development ecosystem, that means Ant or Maven and the popular IDEs). This enables tests to integrate with the developers' workflows.
• Support unattended test runs for integration with build processes and batch runs. Continuous integration servers require this.
• Email Notifications (automated notification on failure or threshold levels). This may be the test runner or tooling that executes it.
• Support distributed execution environment (distributed test bed)
• Distributed application support (distributed SUT)