Automation tools

Extract from Computer Business Review In Search of Quality

Of course, you could outsource the whole testing process, but that does not solve the problem of testing. You will still hit the same bottlenecks and time constraints if you have not allowed sufficient time for testing. Although it will not speed up development, Allcock says: "It kind of helps and there's an independence about it: and you do need to separate your development and your testing."

One way of improving the quality – and taking the grunt-work out of testing – is using automation tools. "What we're trying to do is make it easier for people to do testing as a natural part of their day-to-day work," says Borland's Harrison. "One thing is to integrate the ability to do testing. If you're a developer, your job is to develop code, but if you have to stop and run tests it makes it more difficult. But if you can integrate that and a single mouse-click makes it happen, then you're much more likely to do it."

There are many different testing tools available to help all stages of the development cycle, from code audits that help analyse the complexity of code, to unit tests, where the code is evaluated to see if it does what it is supposed to do. One area where automated tools can really help is with the weekly peer reviews, when developers check over each other's code. "It's boring and laborious and it can be neglected, so automation can really help there," says Harrison.

But as ThoughtWorks' Mitchell points out, although there are tools out there to tackle every stage of development, you still have to build time into the development time to actually use them. "Pretty much every organisation I've been into has invested in automation tools, but they just aren't using them," she says. "It's a big corporate IT phenomenon. We buy packages because it makes us feel we've done something about a problem."

Barry Varley, chief executive of independent testing consultancy Acutest, believes that companies need to invest in training people, and creating effective testing processes, as well as aligning the testing activities with the business needs. "What surprises us most, however, is not poor tool usage. It's the number of development shops that would benefit from spending less time and resources on testing," Varley points out. "Time and money is wasted testing application behaviour that would have little impact on business if it did fail. In one large software developer, we found three quarters of the testing effort on one product was being spent on testing low to medium-impact behaviour, where the likelihood of failure was similarly low to medium. And do the business managers want to delay launch while this goes on? Of course not.

"If you really want to integrate testing into the development lifecycle effectively, start with its governance: take a long look at how aligned the testing is with the business objectives and risks, and provide business managers with more control over testing."

So without the management and organisational impetus to use them, as well as the time in the development process to use them, tools alone cannot solve your testing needs. For, as Hopkins says: "Automation is just a third of the equation of people, process and technology."

The impetus for change must come from the top. A respondent in the Mercury survey, for example, indicated that testing software applications against performance criteria before they went live was regularly ignored by senior management, who instructed them to 'fix it when it goes live'. What is needed is strong project management to prevent this kind of attitude and to ensure that testers and developers communicate throughout the project.

Here again tools can help. Instead of the QA team coming up with a text description to point out problem areas to developers, automated tools can pinpoint the problem. "The QA people are always able to effectively communicate back to developers: the developers are technical, but the QA people don't necessarily have the same level of technical ability, therefore we offer a product where you can capture a snapshot of what's happening when something occurs. That means the QA team can analyse the information and pass it to the development team," says Borland's Harrison.