Anne Kramer

Smartesting, Germany

Use well your time! It flies so swiftly from us; But time through order may be won, I promise. Goethe’s Faust is an inexhaustible source of truths that can be applied to all situations in life. So is this saying, which gets to the heart of a major problem in test automation. If you want to save time, you should automate your tests. However, before you write test scripts, be clear about what you want to test.

Automated test scripts are usually based on existing manual test cases that have been incrementally specified from version to version. As a result, the repository of manual test cases often contains redundancies, if not inconsistencies. If clean-up is not done prior to test automation and order is established, the well-known joke proves true: if you automate chaos, you get faster chaos.

A possible solution is to use Visual ATDD, where test scenarios are derived from visual representations and test automations libraries are linked using action words in a keyword-driven approach. Visual ATDD provides you with the minimum set of test cases covering your needs, requirements or user stories.

Appropriate tool support bridges the gap between those who know to use your system under test and those who are able to automate your tests. Changes are integrated in the workflow and manual test cases as well as automated tests scripts are updated on a regular basis, thus following the frenetic pacing of agile development