Development Process for Automating Software Testing

Software has become an integral part of our society. Software is produced more than ever and its quality has become an important factor to the success of software development organizations. Software testing includes methods and techniques for determining the quality of the software by both finding defects and to the extent it is possible by assuring that a computer program does what it is supposed to do.

Software test automation is an approach where some of the testing activities are automated. Automation can be utilized, for example, to enable us to do more testing than could be done manually in the same time or to do the same amount of testing but in less time. Developing automation is usually laborious and far from a trivial task. Attempts to automate testing often fail because the needed effort, resources and commitment is underestimated.

In his thesis a process model for introducing and developing test automation is presented. The process model has been constructed to assist the development and introduction of test automation. The structure of the process model is iterative so that an automation project implementing the process would be able to cope with a dynamic environment.

The structure of the process itself is rather generic, but it tries to take automation specific issues into consideration better than generic development processes. The process also includes test automation specific material that consists of checklists, guidelines and documentation templates. The data for the process material is based on both current testing literature and practical experience.