Regression testing automation provides an important measure of product quality and can keep the quality moving forward during the SDLC. Unfortunately, automation can take a long time to run, and automation failures generally must be debugged and triaged by the test automation team before any action item can be considered or communicated to the broader team. The resulting time lag and uncertainty greatly reduces the value of the automation, and increases time cost and quality risk.
MetaAutomation is a language of five patterns that provides guidance to new and existing automation efforts, supplies fast and reliable regression testing of expected business behavior for a software solution, speeds quality communication around the team, and reduces latency and resource cost.
The five patterns, Atomic Check, User Pool, Parallel Run, Smart Retry and Automated Triage, form a sequence, representing an order in which the patterns would apply, and a network of dependencies from the more dependent to the less dependent patterns.
For an existing automation project, the least dependent pattern, Atomic Check, can be applied in whole or in part to run the automation faster and create results which are more actionable. If enough of Atomic Check is followed, the dependent patterns can then be applied to further speed, direct and enhance the value of communications resulting from the automation.
The patterns are language-independent. The talk that presents this paper provides and demonstrates a platform-independent sample implementation of the Atomic Check pattern.
Target audience: Expert/Advanced
Matthew Griscom, 2014 Technical Paper, Paper, Slides
