What’s the return on investment of automation?

One of the questions to ask when looking at automation testing software is "What it’s ROI?"  A short answer may be “Anything that reduces the resource (people) hours required to accomplish any given task keeping the quality in tack”. In agile environment there are many aspects we can look at that increases that ROI.  Some of the activates included constant feedback over  quality (which is cheaper),  many types and level of effective and efficient testing  , tools,  a collaborative and quality oriented mindset , which all (and more) reduces the return on investment of the operation.

The Deployment Production Line - Continuous Deployment

Agile introduces the idea that the team should get their software ready for release throughout development. The principles and methods of Continuous Delivery are rapidly gaining recognition as a successful strategy for true business agility. Small changes are constantly tested and that are deployed and released to Production immediately upon verification.  What is it really? How is it Done? What its relation to DevOps ? and some examples.. Here it is :

Are you limited by Yesterday’s Tester Job Defininition?

Automated testers?! Everything changes for them. What is that new mindset expected form them? How are they expected to integrate a good automation framework with agile concepts? what are the “new” skills needed?  and how do they deal with all types of tests in the agile environment?  JoEllen had this to say: "Be aware of the change in mindset/culture. Experiment with modern tools. Keep the big picture of the application in mind and consider individual user stories within the bigger context. Think holistically, and encourage the rest of the team to do so as well."

BDD -Behavior Driven Development

“Behavior-driven development (BDD) is an agile software development technique that encourages collaboration between developers, QA and non-technical or business participants BDD focuses on obtaining a clear understanding of desired software behavior through discussion. It extends TDD by writing test cases in a natural language in combination with the ubiquitous language of domain-driven design and describe the purpose and benefit of their code. This allows the developers to focus on why the code should be created, rather than the technical details.”

Automated Agile Testing Strategy

Overall, with automated testing we are aiming for increased project delivery speed with built in quality. “Are we building the right system” & “Are we building the system right” – This is a fundamental principle in “Agile Testing” where we (as Testers) shouldn’t just be focusing on finding bugs at the end of the development cycle. Instead we should be getting involved with the development as early as possible for example by helping to drive out requirements as & when they’re being worked on . An important part of test strategy is to decide the focus of each type of test and the testing mix.

Automated Acceptance Tests

The acceptance test suite as a whole both verifies that the application delivers the business value expected by the customer and guards against regressions or defects that break pre-existing functions of the application. We are saving retesting and a lot of development effort. "Much of the cost of software development is maintenance—changing the software after it is written. This single fact accounts for much of the difference between successful and unsuccessful test automation efforts." So how do we do it ?