Thursday   28-Nov-2024

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Description of the Automatic Testing Process

In the project life cycle, the testing of configuration (see diagram) can be very time consuming, but is essential to the quality of the end product. Often, by the testing phase of a project, deadlines loom too close, and customer changes mount up, increasing the pressure on test engineers to cut corners.

The automatic test process uses a test script to replace the test specification. When performing a manual test, the test engineer would set up parameters, cause a change, and then view the results. In the same way, the automatic test script manipulates database elements, and assesses the results of the changes, and declares a pass or fail for that test. The script automatically produces a test log that can be viewed on the screen, and later printed to provide test documentation.

Advantages of using automatic testing

• Once the test script is written, the actual tests can be run without being driven by the engineer. The time taken to run a test is much quicker than the manual case, but also, many tests can be run say, overnight. In the morning the engineer can view the results in the test logs, make the changes to the code, and then re-run the automatic test scripts. This has obvious time saving benefits, especially if the cycle needs several repetitions.
• Once a change has been made to the code (either to solve a bug, or because of customer change) often only a minimum retest is manually performed. Studies show that changes are ten times more likely to contain new bugs, but using the existing test script, an entire test can be re-run with no time implication to the project. Quality of the end product is therefore improved.
• The test script can be written so that it can run automatically or interactively. For FAT, this means the same test script can run, putting the log on the screen, and waiting for confirmation to proceed from the witnesses, who cross-check the findings of the test script. The test script log can be printed and signed to form the FAT record.

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