TESTAUTOMATION – QUICK START

The expectation of quality assurance for automated tests is to automate in particular the area of regression tests. This has the advantage that can be found quickly and efficiently if a release delivery in the area of regression and possibly baseline is error free. In practice, it has been found that errors are often found here as well. However, automated tests bring them to light much faster than would be possible with manual testing.

No software is completely free of bugs. Depending on the time available and the test resources, as well as the test budget, errors can be reduced to an acceptable minimum. If you have an experienced team and especially experienced test automation specialists on hand, the available budget can be used very effectively.

Rocketlab specializes in web applications such as portals, eCommerce, eBanking, content management (ECMS / WCMS / AEM), booking systems (flight, hotel, travel) and web-based applications. Depending on the customer and requirements, we work with different tools. HP ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) or QC (Quality Center), QTP (Quick Test Pro) or UFT (Unified Functional Testing) and Load Balancer are used, on the one hand, and Selenium or Selenium GRIDon the other. We have chosen these two technologies as our standards in the abundance of many available tools and have had the best experience.

You can find an overview of general website testing by clicking on the link.

Requirement for test automation

• Regression tests are already available or at least defined (e.g. in the form of acceptance criteria)
• The application under test (AUT) has already passed a certain phase of life
• There is sufficient (time and monthly) budget available
• Experienced test automation engineers are available who can implement the manual tests (or requirements) quickly and efficiently in testing scripts*

*) Many of our customers have completely outsourced this area. Rocketlab takes care of the entire test automation within agile or classic procedures. Here is less critical that the Testautomatisierer sit permanently on site as they completely understand the requirements, develop and are in direct and permanent contact with the project and to test manager. The respective test progress is documented in a common tool (as well as bug / issue handling) such as HP QC / ALM, Jira etc. So our customers always have the current status of the test progress.
The project thus saving recruiting and teaching of test specialists for test automation and also profits from our years of practice and industry experience has been much lower cost.

UFT – Unified Functional Testing

• Has replaced the well-known QTP – Quick Test Professional
• Professional test automation framework in interaction with HP ALM (Application Lifecycle Management), formerly HP QC (Quality Center)
• Very powerful and reliable under Windows environments
• De facto industrial testing standard
• Scripting possible in different programming languages (e.g. VBScript)
• Documentation / reporting and defect management automated in the ALM

Selenium GRID

• Based on an open source framework Selenium
• Can only be used for web-based applications
• Cross-browser and cross-device (iOS, Android) testing possible
• GRID use possible
• Scripting possible in different programming languages (Java, Ruby, PHP, …)

With Selenium, a quick introduction to test automation is possible because with the Selenium IDE (Firefox Extension) Can record processes that will later serve as a test script. Of course, you quickly limit your options here and that’s why Selenium also offers other technologies or tools such as RC (Remote Control) and WebDriver (today both combined in WebDriver 2), with which you can run the test automation directly in browsers on different operating systems and devices (PC, smartphone etc.) in connection with Selendroid and iOS-Driver.

How a Selenium GRID can basically be built (here controlled by Jenkins – Continuous Integration) is shown in the sketch below:

Rocketlab Selenium Grid

Click on the picture to see it in a larger view

The developed software code (shown here at the top left) is checked into a repository. Together with the Selenese testing scripts (Java in connection with TestNG), which are also managed in the same repository, e.g. nightly builts created (control by Jenkins CI) and immediately tested automatically. The development team knows in the morning whether the commits were successful.

In addition, additional test scripts can be created and checked in in Selenese, which are used for the test automation of regression and technical tests. Either started manually or through Jenkins CI, you can use a GRID with various nodes (operating systems, browser types e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, … and browser versions) and deliver test results. The scripts are the same here (for all platforms). Attributes are given via parameters (configured in the Jenkins CI) which are optimally matched to the target platform.