Automature's Unique Approach to AutomationAs release cycles become ever tighter, the pressure on the quality department keeps mounting to certify an ever growing list of features in an ever shrinking amount of time, on a range of environments, that widens every week. The question being asked by quality managers today is no longer whether to automate testing, but what to automate and how to go about doing so in a manner that provides the greatest returns on the investment.
2 .The tool providers provide alternatives, which basically amounts to developing sophisticated test programs (in a multitude of
languages),written by engineers with serious programming skills, but, unfortunately, very limited knowledge about the features, and even less expertise in (system level) functional test case design. This is where the problem starts. Automation engineers develop tests that approximate what the test engineers need and often miss subtleties of the intent of specific tests. In their search for the "repeatable", and hence "automatable" patterns, tests are often simplified to the point of losing effectiveness. Because test designers are typically not skilled at reading such automated test source code, the validity of the tests is seldom questioned, until a customer reports a problem, which the automated test suite was supposed to have covered.
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