Theo Moore

We had an interesting discussion at work today about the nature of test automation. This discussion stemmed from a need to provide a fast, automated means of generating data to satisfy testing scenarios at my place of employment.

Basically, our manual testers generate data necessary for testing every time they want to run a test. In order to complete a short test (<5 minutes), 10 or 15 minutes must be expended. The acceptance criteria for any given test varies greatly from test to test, and often, the criteria is more ad hoc and difficult (or impossible) to express in a way that we can automate easily.

One theory is that test automation is strictly that: testing automated. If I write a line of code, that code should be in support of testing a set of criteria and producing a pass/fail result.

I totally disagree. Test automation is simply automation in support of testing. It doesn't necessarily generate a pass/fail result, but might ease the burden of a manual tester trying to achieve one. If I create an interface to allow a manual tester to build sets of test data quickly, and then produce an automated process that will pickup that data and do work, this, too, is test automation. So, any code written to simplify and make more efficient the overall testing effort must be test automation.

Part of my reason for approaching automation as a development project rather than simply testing is so I can think more of the box.

For example, I am about to begin work on just such an interface..in .Net, not QTP. My estimate is that it will allow a user to create useable data sets in a 10th of the time it would have taken before, as it will support templates, iterations, and can be extended to add tools (such as generating a set of data for all states, etc) very easily.

I've been evaluating SlickEdit for awhile now, and wanted to see how it worked.

In a word: wonderful!

It's a good IDE, and does the job very well. A couple of good points in particular are:
1) It provides a mostly standard interface to work on projects of all different kinds. This is particularly useful if you have apps written in a variety of languages, or are called upon to support a legacy app whose native IDE is unknown to you.
2) It comes out of the box with a great set of tools including a very powerful RegEx builder...most handy in my work.
3) The online community support for this tool is fantastic, with many tools written to extend it's functionality.


I did have a couple of negatives to mention, however:
1) If you are using only one language, then the learning curve for this tool might be a bit steep. (There is also a plug in to VS if that is your flavour of IDE, but I didn't get as much time to evaluate this plugin).
2) I do .NETCF dev in my spare time, which SlickEdit doesn't really support (or doesn't seem too...feel free to correct me, if am wrong. :-) )
3) It supports VBScript, but it won't compile or give you runtime access to it like something like VBEdit will. You can get around some of this by running csript or wscript with your file, but it would be great to see SlickEdit support this out of the box.

Over all, it is a great product and does a great job.

Edit: Forgot the link to the product!!! :-S http://www.slickedit.com