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AGILE GUI Automation with Foxtrot

5/20/10

Written by Richard Milam, Director of Business Development

We have been exploring where Foxtrot technology could play a role in the software testing market for some time now. While attending the STAREAST 2010 Software Testing Analysis and Review conference in Orlando last month, we uncovered some significant industry trends.

Agile Software Development (Wikipedia definition), a term coined in 2001 to describe a teamwork oriented software development methodology that encourages frequent inspection and adaption resulting in better software being delivered more expeditiously is the new standard to which the Fortune 500 companies attending the conference aspired to and discussed often. When Agile was discussed, we often heard the words and phrases “scrum”, “sprint” and “GUI Automation” mentioned as well. Scrum is a soccer term used for a play where all of the players move down the field at the same time. Sprint is used to describe short bursts of software development resulting in functionality being delivered to market in a matter of a few weeks or months as opposed to multiple months and years using conventional legacy development practices.

Scrum and Sprint seem to fit but why GUI Automation? Well, nearly every presenter we sat in on made the point that in order for Agile to be effective that more unit testing was required. In order to do unit testing effectively, you must be able to exercise (test) the Graphical User Interface to emulate what a human user would do; therefore you need a GUI Automation tool.

In reviewing the GUI automation solutions available, we noticed that although all of them have recording capabilities to capture test scripts, they generate code that usually needs to be manipulated in order to complete or modify the test scenario.

Manipulating, say .Net code is not a problem if you’re a software developer but if you’re a Quality Assurance analyst it’s probably a problem. The presenters advised the attendees that it was not a problem and that the QA folks could just simply learn to code.

Now, we coder / developers know that is indeed a big and unreasonable hurdle. That is why we believe that FoxtrotOne will be quickly adopted by QA teams as well as developer teams (who would much rather develop products than code to test the product) alike. Why? Because FoxtrotOne is the GUI Automation technology that requires no coding and can easily be altered by non-coders to accommodate fluid testing environments.

Look for a Foxtrot AT (Agile Tester) case study to be published next month that illustrates how an international airline reservation software provider cut their testing time to a fraction of what it was using the current industry testing tools while saving nearly six figures on testing software.

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Based on your assistance, I was able to successfully write a script that automatically logs a message when an error occurs without having to stop and restart the script manually for each record. Last week, this would have 'liberated' me from having to do so 104 times while the script was trying to run to completion. We will now be even more efficient with this process, plus I can incorporate my newfound knowledge to other scripts which may have similar scenarios in other areas of our bank. Thanks for setting aside some of your valuable time to follow up with my support question.

Ken Scharnagl, The Heritage Bank - AVP Research, Testing, Implementation