Do everything in Java…

[Russel Winder via Digitalmars-d]

On Sat, 2014-12-06 at 07:24 -0800, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> 
[…]
> Oh, certainly I'm not expecting *all* tests to be automated -- there 
> are some things that are fundamentally non-automatable, like testing 
> look-and-feel, user experience, new feature evaluation, etc.. My 
> complaint was that the lack of automation has caused QA to be 
> completely occupied with menial, repetitive tasks (like navigate the 
> same set of menus 100 times a day to test 100 developer images, just 
> to make sure it still works as expected), that no resources are left 
> for doing more consequential work. Instead, things have gone the 
> opposite direction -- QA is hiring more people because the current 
> staff can no longer keep up with the sheer amount of menial 
> repetitive testing they have to do.
> 
> If these automatable tests were actually automated, the QA 
> department would have many resources freed up for doing other 
> important work -- like testing more edge cases for potential 
> problematic areas, etc..

On the plus side, a couple of organizations have had me in to teach 
their development staff Python so they can write scripting components 
for their UI, and teach their QA staff Python so they can script all 
the menial stuff testing away. Worked very well. So well in one case 
that the QA staff were able to have breaks and relax a bit and do 
really high quality end-user testing. HR thought they were slacking so 
sacked half of them. I think the other half of QA have now left and 
the product testing is clearly suffering relying solely on automated 
tests that are not being properly updated.

[…]

-- 
Russel.
=============================================================================
Dr Russel Winder      t: +44 20 7585 2200   voip: sip:russel.winder at ekiga.net
41 Buckmaster Road    m: +44 7770 465 077   xmpp: russel at winder.org.uk
London SW11 1EN, UK   w: www.russel.org.uk  skype: russel_winder