No More Automated Test Engineers

As I reviewed several candidates’ resumes recently, something bothered me.  The open position is for an Automated Test Engineer for Agile Teams.  I am looking for an automated test engineer, but I find that I am bothered by the automated test engineer role.  After I thought about this for a while, I realized that I am still thinking about the “Whole-team” Test Automation post.  If everyone is an automator, then there is no need for an automator.

The common thing about the automation engineers I have met with and interviewed is that their current career path depends on the ignorance of their testing colleagues.

Even though it may seem to be disingenuous (I grew my career as an automation engineer), but I see no place for it anymore.  The presence of an automation engineer at a company is a sign of a problem.  In all likelihood, it means that a two-tiered system exists in the company’s test team.  In a proper agile test team, all members of the team have the skills of automated test engineers and are ready to use them whenever they are needed.

BTW:  I recruit for automation engineers because the industry has not caught up with us yet. I look forward to a day when the base expectations of a software tester include high levels of technical proficiency and mad testing skills.

Regular Expressions: A Tester’s Best Friend

Okay, I feel I am entitled to a bit of hyperbole, but I think regular expressions are great.  I like them for two reasons.  One is they are a programming language, and many programmers do not know regular expressions very well.  It is always great when the testing team has a technical advantage over the application developers.

The first reason is a bit lame.  The real reason I like regular expressions is that they enable you to have some much power in your automated tests while keeping the test framework very simple.

For those unfamiliar with regular expressions, regular expressions enable you to match patterns in strings of text using a simple syntax of reserved characters and patterns.  Regular expressions range from something simple like “Bob.*Jones” where “.*” is essentially a wildcard where matches include “Bob the wildman Jones” and “Bob Jones”  You can also make regular expressions to make sure that a value matches a date format or social security format or use a regular expression match an application validation message where the message changes in some predictable way when a test runs.

In our test framework, we use regular expressions for all automation components involved with verification.  For example, we use many “verify data” components.  In these components, you enter the expected value for a field in the application under test.  All our fields are regEx enabled, and typically this means that you enter an exact string value or a regular expression pattern to match in the test.  This means you have a very simple test with a lot of power.

Implementation note:  There was a point of the development of our automation framework, we had to make decisions about whether to use regular expressions and how to use them.  As much as it pains me to say, the biggest factor was whether the use of regular expressions would be too hard for testers.  Fortunately, we decided that testers are smart enough to handle regular expressions (and of course, they are!)

The Role of Reputation in Agile Testing

In Agile development teams, your reputation is more important than ever.

In traditional development teams, your peers certainly had opinions about you  They might love you or hate you or have no idea who you are.  The formal process of traditional development protected you, and it limited the impact that your reputation had on your professional work product.  For example, people from other groups may have approve test scripts you write.  Or you might execute test scripts written by someone else.  Your personal responsibility for your work was limited.  As long as you mechanically performed your tasks, you were covered.  

All that changes in agile.  In the most agile of shops, agile teams are self organizing, and the agile tester has a lot of discretion.  You are no longer protected by process. You can succeed or fail on your own.  

The roles on agile teams are not clearly defined in a traditional sense -- everyone should work together to complete the task, regardless of a person’s formal role.  Agile teams should be self organizing and figure out the best way to do things on their own.  What is best depends on a lot of things:  time, skills, interests, and trust.  Trust is based on reputation, and reputation is based on the sum of your past work.

At my company, we adhere strongly to the principles of agile, and development teams make a lot of their own decisions.  For example,  the amount of coding that happens during a sprint ultimately depends on the feeling of the team.  Of course, our teams are committed to delivering the most functionality they can each sprint, but the code has to be clean and the team has to have confidence in the work product.  

We deliver develop and deliver code in a two-week sprints.  In two weeks, there are only ten business days, and all our code is delivered into production at the end of the sprint.  Whether programmers feel comfortable creating new code for seven days or nine days during a sprint depends on things like testing confidence.  From the testing perspective, we need to provide good regression coverage (and share our results regularly with the team), and we must make everyone feel good about the sprint-level work we are doing.  It is, of course, essential to keep up to date with testing (immediate feedback), but the perception of success is greatly influenced by our reputation.  In this sense, a tester’s reputation has a real impact on the output of the development team.  

“Whole-team” Test Automation

At my company, we practice the art of “whole-team test automation.”  Very simply, this means that test automation is not a specialized skill on our test team.  For us, the ability to develop automated tests is a required skill for all members of our test team.  At our company, highly skilled automated test engineers are common as dirt.

If you thinking that this seems like a lot of work, you are right.  It takes an effort.  So, why would we invest in this idea?

• In agile development, rapid development of automated tests is critical.  While we still struggle with keeping up with automation during sprint work, the option is always there for the testers and the scrum teams to do what is best for the project.  This may mean aggressively developing regression tests throughout the project.  It is not acceptable for one project to have good coverage just because they happen to have the good automator – all projects deserve technically skilled testers.
• At many companies, automated tests are developed, executed, and owned by a separate group within the test team. This creates a two-tiered test team.  It creates a situation where the most technical members become more technical because they have the most practice and the least technical members have no opportunities to grow their skills.  That sucks if you not technical and have no opportunity to grow.
• The more technical a tester is, the more tools the tester has in his toolkit, and the better the tester will adapt to new situations.  The new and changing situations range from new technologies such as services testing to a fundamental change in how software testing is done.  Adapt or die.
• Agile testers are developers.  As members of a software development team, everyone should know how to code.  It is good for your self esteem, and it helps you gain and keep the respect of the other developers on your team.

If you are convinced that we are on to something, how do you go about it?

• Build or select a suitable test framework and implementation methodology, and develop a transparent approach to testing.  For this, we chose HP’s BPT framework with QTP as the underlying automation engine.  Using BPT and our “Archetype” implementation technique, all members work together and take advantage previous work and each other’s skills.  With a good framework, new team members can build tests, and experienced automators have opportunities to work on challenging work.
• Good recruiting.  Regular, run-of-the-mill “QAs” are not right people for the team.  Be prepared for this to take a long time.  Because of the history of testing (a combination of “QA” process types and non-technical manual script runners), many good people stay away from testing jobs.  My only advice here is to start with high standards, don’t let your standards drop, and keep hope.  Great people are out there.  And in my opinion, most recruiters will not be your friend.  They will pressure you to take conventional candidates.  Be aware of recruiters.
• Be prepared to train people .  Some of the most obviously experienced candidates will take the most time.  Many experienced automators do not work in a whole-team automation environment.  As a result, they tend to build tests for themselves and not for the team.  There is often “unlearning” that has to happen.  
• Promote technical skills. Learn new programming languages and new technologies.  This year when we studied Ruby together, we spent some time looking at Rails projects.  By looking at and studying Rails, we accidentally learned about MVC frameworks.  
• Devote enough time. In addition to the sprint work that we do (with or without other testers), we devote an hour each day to work together on automation.  This way, we share ideas, learn from each other, set high expectations for each other, and continue to practice our art.  There is a bonus with this approach when you are working on projects that are not interesting.  If your project stinks, you can work with other team members on their automation needs.  Everyone wins.

As you live with the “whole-team” automated test philosophy, be prepared for things you do not predict.  Train your team, give them the tools and support, give up control, and let them surprise you.

Migration from BPT 10 to 11: Changes to Data Tables

In standard QTP, data tables are the work horses for managing test data.  They are used for data driving tests, passing data from one action to another, storing large volumes of test results, and for iterating tests.  In BPT, data tables take a back seat to other means of managing test data, most notably, test parameter data.  But even in BPT, there is a place for data tables.  For example, test data read from associated Excel files can be read in at run time and table data from the application under test can be stored in the component data table and reviewed in the test logs.

In BPT 10, each component has a local datasheet.  Because each component runs independently (remember the slow execution speed of BPT 10 – one component is loaded, it runs, the component is closed, the next component is loaded, it runs, …), there is no global data sheet.

There is a key benefit in BPT 10 to the way tests are constructed.  In a component, you can create data tables named “Actual” and “Expected.”  If this component is used more than once in a test, you don’t have to worry about name contention – the scope of data table names is in a single instance of a component.  In standard QTP, all data tables are exposed to the entire test and you have to make sure that no data tables share the same name. In BPT 11, tests share much more in common with standard QTP tests, and data tables must now be unique.

In my migration from BPT 10 to 11, I had to rethink some of my key assumptions about how I use data tables.

1. Because of the appearance of the global data sheet in the business component, I changed from using the DataTable.Import method to DataTable.ImportSheet.  The Import method loads the Excel sheet into the first data table. In BPT 10, the first data table is a local sheet; in BPT 11, the first data table is the global sheet. 

A surprise change for me when I ran my components migrated from 10 in 11 is that the imported data was not where I expected it to be.  This caused verifications to fail.  I was further surprised when some of my tests ran extra iterations.  Tests ran extra iterations because the import method added rows to the global datasheet, and the global datasheet determines the number of iterations a test runs.

ImportSheet enables you to specify which sheet to import and where to place it.  When using ImportSheet, you have to know the name of the data sheet you want to overwrite – if your test iterates, this must be a unique name.

2. Because the scope of data sheet names is not longer local to business components, you must manage the names of the sheets and make sure the names are unique.  As you do this, consider analysis of test results.  If your test has 10 iterations, there may be 10 instances of the “Expected_Result” sheet.  Getting the iteration value of component at run time is difficult so I chose to make the sheets unique by adding part of a time stamp to the name.  Ten instances of a sheet with similar names is difficult to analyze.  To give clarity, I added a line to the log file identifying which data sheet goes with which iteration.

Here is a summary of the changes I made:

BPT 10:

DataTable.Import GetCurrentTestPath() & "\" & strQCExcelSheet

BPT 11:

strUniqueSheetName = “Reference_” & Minute(Now) & Second(Now)

Reporter.ReportEvent micDone, strUniqueSheetName, “Look for reference data at “ & strUniqueSheetName

DataTable.AddSheets(strUniqueSheetName)

DataTable.ImportSheet GetCurrentTestPath() & "\" & strQCExcelSheet, 1, strUniqueSheetName

 

Generally, the migration from BPT 10 to 11 did not require changes to the automation code.  Underlying BPT is QTP, and QTP code did not change.  The change in how BPT handles data tables may be unnoticed in many implementations, depending on which features of BPT are used.  For those who push the limits of how BPT handles data, this undocumented change to data tables will be a stumbling block.  I suppose there is a price to pay to get BPT to perform at an acceptable speed.  I’ll pay this one.

Checklist for Agile Testing

During a recent test team discussion, we reviewed the key features of agile software testing.  As a team, we all have a good idea of what is important with agile testing and how it is different from conventional testing.  We worked on the checklist to give us a tool for keeping our agile test mindset fresh.

Use the checklist to question your own agile test performance.  It is good for a self examination or a discussion with your project team.  For example, you can use it to share your vision of agile testing with a team that is new to agile development.

For most of the questions, "yes" is the best answer.  It is doubtful that you will answer "yes" (or whatever the best answer is ) for all the questions -- use the questions and answers to provoke thought.

Leadership

o       Am I taking items off the mental shelf space for the lead programmer, scrum master, and/or business user?

o       Am I the scrum master for the project? If not, could or should I have been?

o       Did I help the scrum team understand risks?

o       Do I organize work for the project?

o       Have I made decisions in the best interest of the project?  Did I give up ownership and did I take on ownership of right things to make the project successful?

o       Did I help new team members learn the project?

Analysis

o       Am I documenting the project, opening tickets and describing requirements?

o       Am I writing user stories?

o       Did I come up with any of the requirements for the project?  This is an indication that you are actively participating in the project.

o       Did I define and/or develop tests at the beginning of the sprint? Early work is good work.

Collaboration

o       Are other members of the scrum team helping with testing?  In agile, any member of the team should be able to test.

o       Do I feel like I am up to date with programmers and business users throughout the sprint?  A catch-up period later in the sprint is a bad sign.

o       During meetings, do I write on the white board?  This is an indication that you are actively thinking, communicating, and  participating in the project.

o       Have I sat with a programmer while he or she wrote code for the project?

o       Have I sat with the business users? 

o       Have I tested on the programmer’s workstation recently?  This is key to providing really immediate feedback.

o       Is there a lot of scrum team chatter?  Teams that talk to each other are more agile than those that don’t.

Testing

o       Am I giving really fast feedback to programmers on the most important things?

o       Am I known as “Fast Feedback [your name]” or “Quick Test [your name]?”

o       Are the programmers comfortable coding for the full sprint? Good agile testing can directly increase the productivity of the programmers.

o       Did I add value as a testing expert?  For example, did I help business users perform good test analysis?

o       Did I build any tools to help verify the project?

o       Did I update existing automated tests that changed because of my project work?

o       Did I use the simplest solutions for the problems I worked on?

o       Did we get user acceptance feedback very early and very often in the sprint?

o       Have I built regression tests for new functionality before or while it is being built?

o       How long are issues sitting with me before I turn them around?  Issues should sit no longer than a day or two.

o       How old are the bugs we are finding on the project?  The only good bug is a dead bug, and the best dead bug is one that didn't live long.

o       Is a lot of testing taking place at the end of the sprint?  Best answer is "very little."  Make an effort to test early and regularly throughout the sprint.  If you are testing a lot at the end, you are probably not being very agile.

o       Was more than one person involved in user acceptance sessions?  Do the users I worked with represent the user community well?