Automating A Competitive Advantage

How to avoid the "not enough time for testing scenario"

Product companies strive to shorten their time-to-market with the aim of securing or maintaining a strategically competitive advantage. During the development of a project, if delays occur then the first place that usually gets squeezed is the testing.

Automated testing can provide a means to address this. The development of automated tests can provide the following advantages:

Repeatable tests
Improved regression testing
Reduced time scales for acceptance tests
Faster and more complete execution of tests than manual execution

Once the initial work in scripting a specification has been completed, the test script can be executed numerous times, performing exactly the same tests with consistent pass criteria. This can also ensure consistent behaviour over product ranges as the same test script is utilised. Test automation can also provide a greater level of coverage due to the amount of testing that can be executed in a given timescale.

Automating Success

An existing Atrial customer investigated an automated testing approach and made the decision to introduce a suite of tests to exercise a new series of network devices.

This automated approach enabled the new software for the complete series of network devices to be completed on time and meet the original specifications; despite a view during development that the devices may have to be released with reduced functionality to meet the timescales.

The specification of features was fluid and changed regularly during the course of the work. Atrial provided a number of consultants to implement test scripts, based on the requirements specifications, as new features were added. Atrial were able to provide consultants on the customer site for on-going development for several years.

The implementation of the test suite reduced one week of manual testing into 3 to 4 hours, as a direct result of creating automated test scripts. A script could be executed on its own or as part of a test suite. This also had the added benefit of providing consistent and reproducible tests that could be used for regression testing as well as testing on new devices.

Substantially reduced test times became a driving force behind the development of the functionality.