Agile Success Through Test Automation: An eXtreme Approach
Jon Tilt · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2009
SYNOPSIS “Automation, Automation, Automation” was the battle cry of our leaders as we embarked on our first “iterative” mission with a large team of twenty testers; within our agile iterative test approach, we have invested heavily in test automation, unit test, and continual integration. After a number of years of operating this strategy, we had reached a point where the regression test took up to ten days to run through (35,000 tests), and we had to create an approach we called “laser-guided testing” to pinpoint the best set of tests to run each build. We can now run a complete targeted regression in less than a day! We saw many benefits of our agile automated approach, but there are costs and pitfalls that are worth considering ahead of time. Introduction My name is Jon Tilt; I have been involved in software development for twenty-five years and specifically in software testing since 1996. I started testing in the functional test team of MQSeries, a large middleware product. Since then I have progressed through test management, test project lead, and test architect roles. I currently work for IBM's Software Group under the WebSphere brand and am the Chief Test Architect across a number of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) products that generate in excess of one billion dollars of revenue each year. The products we deliver are primarily enterprise middleware offerings (application servers, messaging backbones, etc.) that many major Fortune 500 companies bet their businesses on.