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Right Under Your Fingertips: Built-in Windows Tools for Test Automation Launching a test automation effort can be a daunting undertaking. An abundance of testing tools are available-but if you do not have previous automation experience, how can you know if you are investing in the right solution? A safe alternative is to begin with automation tools already included in the Microsoft Windows operating system. You can use these tools to build your own test automation system that produces professional results. Matt Lowrie demonstrates several Windows utilities that can be linked together to create a basic test automation framework. To begin, you'll need a basic knowledge of JScript (Javascript) or VBScript. Windows Script Host can be used
to execute applications and gather and report test results. Learn how to automate tests using Internet Explorer and the Microsoft® Office Suite.
- Learn how to access the Windows file system
- Use XML for documenting test results
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Matt Lowrie, Anark Corporation
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Tomorrow's Test Lab Today: One-Touch Test Bed Automation Many software organizations are struggling with the complexity of their testing environments especially with the rapidly growing number of production environments. In many cases, the cost of creating those testing environments is prohibitive. Functional testing tools combined with new virtual lab automation (VLA) technology is changing the way test teams deal with this problem. Steve Kishi will demonstrate how VLA software can create myriads of virtual
environments quickly and at far less cost than physical environments. In addition, Steve will discuss how an automated test bed framework can shave months off software development projects, reduce development and test
equipment costs, and dramatically increase the quality of delivered software systems. Learn about this new technology and evaluate whether it is right for your organization.
- Differentiate test beds from test environments
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Steven Kishi, VMware
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Keyword-Driven Methodology: An Automation Success Story Successfully implementing any automation tool is challenging. Using keyworddriven testing for system and regression testing is an additional challenge. Paulo Barros shares the techniques he used to build, manage, and deliver
effective testing using a custom built keyword-driven automation tool. Paulo describes in depth six important changes that must be implemented. First, organizational change where testers adopt a generalist rather than a specialist approach. Second, creating a support infrastructure for the tool. Third, developing the processes to be used by testers, developers, and project
managers. Fourth, implementing a training plan giving testers the required tool skills to effect organizational change. Fifth, creating a new test design methodology that focuses on automation rather than manual testing. And sixth, creating a team to support other testers making the transition to automation.
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Paulo Barros, Progressive Insurance
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Introducing Test Automation: The Pain and Gain of the First Year Are you contemplating moving from totally manual testing to automated testing? Andy Redwood shares a case study of a leading financial organization in the UK that did exactly that. Their goal was to automate testing using the
latest tools across multiple projects. They have just finished the first year of the project and have learned some valuable lessons. Andy will describe this
organization's starting position and the goals they set; a step-by-step tour through the processes, tasks, and activities they performed; the new roles that were needed; and how the organizational structure was changed to support
automation. Andy will also share the mistakes they made with decisions, processes, environments, and automation and how they dealt with them. Overall, after the first year, they have laid a foundation for future success based
on sound automation principles.
- Learn how to create an automation strategy
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Andy Redwood, Neutrino Systems
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Ruby And WATIR: Your New Test Automation Tools Ready to start writing your own test scripts? Not sure of what tools to use? Kalen Howell discovered Ruby, a powerful scripting language that is easy to learn. Using Ruby led Kalen to WATIR, an open source tool written in Ruby. WATIR is used to drive Web sites through Internet Explorer just as a user would. Just by following a few examples, Kalen was able to create automated test scripts in a matter of minutes. Learning more about Ruby enabled Kalen to write more robust scripts. Ruby connects to databases, writes XML, creates and reads data files, and can be used to create customized libraries. Combining the powerful features of WATIR with the robust and easy to learn language of Ruby gives the tester powerful tools for automated scripting.
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Kalen Howell, LexisNexis
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STARWEST 2006: Positioning your Test Automation Team as a Product Test automation teams are typically created with the expectation of facilitating faster testing and higher product quality. To achieve these goals, the test
automation team must overcome many challenges--stale test data, burdensome test script maintenance, too-frequent product upgrades, insufficient resources, and unfamiliarity with the systems under test. Satya Mantena describes a creative approach to test automation that overcomes
these challenges. The first step is implementing keyword-driven testing. Satya demonstrates how the keyword testing approach is implemented proving this approach is not just theory but has been "proven in action." Satya concludes
by showing how positioning the test automation team as a "product" rather than as a central service, or embedded within each testing team, results in better testing.
- Examine the difference between a service and a product
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Satya Mantena, Nielsen Media Research
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The Power of Continous Integration with Automated Unit Tests Better, faster, cheaper-the mantra of many software methodologies and tools. Can it ever be true? Illustrated with examples from Agitar Software's internal development process, Jeffrey Fredrick describes the psychological impact of rapid feedback and how it unleashes the best in people. Find out what continuous integration means in the real world and how it can be coupled with automated developer (unit) tests to reduce the number and cost of failures. Learn about the psychological impact of lava lamps, email notifications, and Web applications as feedback mechanisms and why feedback is not only for developers. Instead of expecting people to act like machines, you can use continuous integration and automated tests to leverage the complementary strengths of each. See how automating integration maximizes the return on your developer testing investment.
- The impact of continuous integration
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Jeffrey Fredrick, Agitar Software Inc
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Better Software Conference 2006: Software Production Line Automation Traditional manufacturing employs extensive automation for maximum efficiency and reliability. Manufacturing organizations invest heavily in tooling and infrastructure to automate production lines and reap great cost savings. For certain software applications and technologies, the software development process can be optimized if it is thought of and run like a manufacturing process. With a focused tools group made up of architects, engineers, and technicians, you can build a software product line for your applications. Find out from Thomas Tyler what a software production line looks like and how it supports geographically distributed development teams with highly automated workflows. Learn to implement a concurrent development process with a flexible project management infrastructure that delivers more functionality per unit time.
- The tools and supporting infrastructure of a software production line
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C. Thomas Tyler, The Go To Group Inc
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Don't Whine - Build Your Own Test Tools The highly customized hardware-software system making up the new flight operations system for the world's largest airline did not lend itself to off-the-shelf tools for test automation. With a convergence of on-demand, highly available technologies and the requirement to make the new system compatible with hundreds of legacy applications, the test team was forced to build their own test software. Written in Java, these tools have helped increase test coverage and improved the efficiency of the test team. One tool compares the thirty-one year old legacy system with its new equivalent for undocumented differences. Clay Bailey will demonstrate these tools, including one that implements predictive randomization methods and another that decodes and manipulates hexadecimal bit string representations.
- Custom test tools for a unique systems environment
- Innovative ways to develop and use Java for writing test tools
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Clay Bailey, IBM
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Automated Setup and Tear Down of Complex, Multi-tier Test Configurations Many software test and development teams struggle to test systems with complex set-up steps and multiple configurations. With these interdependent software systems, testers must iterate through very large, multi-dimensional test matrixes (for example, permuting front-, middle-, and back-tier platforms) to complete the test requirements. Testers have the difficult and sometimes seemingly impossible task of duplicating failures and saving the system’s state for later analysis and debugging. With several emerging commercial software tools, software development organizations can successfully implement live-state software test configuration provisioning and capture systems.
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James Phillips, Akimbi Systems
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