Implementing Automated Software Testing: How to Save Time and Lower Costs While Raising Quality (Paperback)

~ (Author), (Author), Bernie Gauf (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

“This book fills a huge gap in our knowledge of software testing. It does an excellent job describing how test automation differs from other test activities, and clearly lays out what kind of skills and knowledge are needed to automate tests. The book is essential reading for students of testing and a bible for practitioners.”
—Jeff Offutt, Professor of Software Engineering, George Mason University

“This new book naturally expands upon its predecessor, Automated Software Testing, and is the perfect reference for software practitioners applying automated software testing to their development efforts. Mandatory reading for software testing professionals!”
—Jeff Rashka, PMP, Coauthor of Automated Software Testing and Quality Web Systems

Testing accounts for an increasingly large percentage of the time and cost of new software development. Using automated software testing (AST), developers and software testers can optimize the software testing lifecycle and thus reduce cost. As technologies and development grow increasingly complex, AST becomes even more indispensable.  This book builds on some of the proven practices and the automated testing lifecycle methodology (ATLM) described in Automated Software Testing and provides a renewed practical, start-to-finish guide to implementing AST successfully.

In Implementing Automated Software Testing, three leading experts explain AST in detail, systematically reviewing its components, capabilities, and limitations. Drawing on their experience deploying AST in both defense and commercial industry, they walk you through the entire implementation process—identifying best practices, crucial success factors, and key pitfalls along with solutions for avoiding them. You will learn how to:

•     Make a realistic business case for AST, and use it to drive your initiative
•     Clarify your testing requirements and develop an automation strategy that reflects them
•     Build efficient test environments and choose the right automation tools and techniques for your environment
•     Use proven metrics to continuously track your progress and adjust accordingly

Whether you’re a test professional, QA specialist, project manager, or developer, this book can help you bring unprecedented efficiency to testing—and then use AST to improve your entire development lifecycle.

About the Author

Elfriede Dustin, Thom Garrett, and Bernie Gauf work together at Innovative Defense Technologies (www.idtus.com), which specializes in the design, development, and implementation of automated software testing solutions.

Elfriede Dustin has authored multiple software testing books and articles based on her many years of actual hands-on automated software testing experience. Elfriede leads IDT’s efforts in automated software testing research programs.

Thom Garrett has experience in planning, testing, and deployment of complex systems for DoD and commercial applications for companies such as Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Digital System Resources (DSR), Inc., and America Online (AOL). Thom received a master’s degree from the University of San Francisco.

Bernie Gauf is the president of IDT. Bernie has been invited to participate in numerous DoD panels associated with the use of new technology, testing conferences, and as a guest speaker to share his insights on automated software testing.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional; 1 edition (March 14, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321580516
• ISBN-13: 978-0321580511
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #203,771 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pragmatic and practical help for test automation, May 12, 2009

By	Lisa Crispin (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews

Although this book is not oriented towards agile software development, it's still a solid resource for anyone new to test automation. It's pragmatic, practical, clearly written, easy to understand. I especially like the six "Keys" for automation payoff. The authors explain the reasons for automating - it might seem obvious to some but many newbies don't see all the potential benefits. The book also blows through automation myths. There's a lot of emphasis on ROI, which is often overlooked.

Where the advice I give on automation differs from this book is making it a whole team effort, rather than the test team only, but that's easier to do in an agile setting. Also, the authors do talk about things like interviewing stakeholders, and getting people with the right skills, these are all so important.

I wish the book had a section on continuous integration and automated build process. I think in another few years nobody will question the need for this, any more than people currently question the need for automated source code management. Whereas a few years ago nobody in my conference tutorials was doing CI, nowadays about a third of the people are. I think it's so critical to have a way to continually run all the automated regression tests every time new code is checked in. The book makes a passing reference to this, and it does mention test automation at different levels starting at the unit level, but it doesn't explain why you need a build process and how to set one up.

Nevertheless, it's a great resource, and will give readers a good grip on the fundamentals of test automation. I get so frustrated when people think it's impossible to automate, or that they have to hire some expensive consultant to get it done. This book will enable teams to be much more successful. It is a good overview of all the different areas where automation can help a team tremendously.

Just be sure to also buy a book that tells you how to set up continuous integration and automated builds, such as _Pragmatic Project Automation_ by Mike Clark, or _Continuous Integration_ by Paul Duvall, Andy Glover and Steve Matyas. Or _Ship It_ by Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars first, automate the unit tests, March 28, 2009

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The authors give you a top level description of why automated software testing is highly desirable, along with detailed guidelines for doing so. The tone is very realistic, making you aware of many issues associated with the topic.

For one thing, you are cautioned to avoid the blandishments of a vendor who might suggest that her product will meet all your testing needs. In the authors' experience, there is no single tool that covers all major operating systems. The book also advises you to look at open source freeware. There is a surprising amount of good stuff freely available, that you might want to check first before considering proprietary products.

The book mentions many reasons for automation. These include manual tester fatigue. But also that some things are very difficult to test in a manual fashion. Often this could be because manual testing is at the GUI level. There could be bugs deep in the code, maybe in computational blocks.

Which also leads to the point that the "testers" for making automated tests often have a different skill set from manual testers. The latter might not be programmers. The former should be, with access to the source code [white box or grey box testing]. Because this gives them knowledge about what automated tests to write, that test critical aspects.

Naively, given the book's nature, we might expect it to say automate everything in sight. But the book's credibility is enhanced by it explaining that this is simply not economically feasible. The estimate is 40-60% of tests to be automated. Table 6.2 in the book is a list of questions that can be applied to each test, to suggest whether a test is suitable for automation. Roughly, tests that will be run often are a high candidate for automation.

The book also strongly recommends extensive unit testing. This is the lowest level of testing and bugs caught here have the best payoff in terms of minimising the cost to fix. A tight software development loop; "agile" as opposed to "waterfall"-like, though the book doesn't use these terms. Plus often unit testing might not be doable at the GUI level anyway, if the units are computational routines. So punting by not having automated unit tests and expecting manual tests to later find bugs in these units is very bad. Of coure, the book also describes higher level tests like regression and functional tests. But first do the unit tests.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Avoiding Automation Pitfalls, June 11, 2009

By	Dmitry N. "Dmitry" (Manhattan, KS) - See all my reviews

Highly recommended!
This book covers automated software testing pitfalls. If your past automated software testing efforts resulted in failure, some of the pitfalls described in this book might sound familiar.
If you are starting up an automated testing effort, read the pitfalls, avoid these lessons learned.
Hiring automated testing engineers? Skills required for automated testing efforts are described in detail.
Do you need to build an automated testing framework for a larger testing program? This book has it covered.
Do you need to evaluate testing tools but don't know what criteria to look for? This book provides an entire appendix of tool evaluation examples.
Do you need to convince your management why automated software testing is the way to go, this book covers the business case for it.
This book will help you through all your automated testing challenges.