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13th Issue - May 2007 |
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| Technology Assisted Manual Testing for Productivity Gains |
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The importance of Software Testing cannot be overemphasized given the sense of awareness and practices that the industry has matured into; however, we have closely noticed certain key productivity related aspects that are surprisingly missed in the testing activities, hence this article.
All productivity measurement and optimization activities are usually centered on Test Management/Process and there seems to be only one engineering-level equivalent viz. Test Automation. This then divides the testing world into Manual Testing and Automated Testing (and raising an ocean of discussions on each of them). Many companies have succeeded reasonably well using automation (like Microsoft) to perform testing and then there have been a lot of companies which have had little or no success upon attempting the same, regardless of the tools they have bought or used. There are a dozen reasons why things which may work one way or other based on the context of the product, tools, people, methods and several other factors. We do not want to join the bandwagon of discussing that, as it is a much frequented topic in all publication mediums in Software Testing space.
What remains to be an immortal situation is the fallback/degree of Manual Testing involved in any company’s Software Engineering activities. Now, the actual challenge of Test Engineering shifts into an unsaid art of having to increase the productivity of Manual Testing. As stated earlier, we have practices and tools that address the Test Management side of this (automated artifact management, people collaboration, reporting and such functions), but on the engineering side, it is almost a non-existent discipline.
The irony of this situation is that the so-called Manual Testing can benefit a lot out of technology tools which were originally developed, perhaps, for a different purpose.
We at ValueMinds are developing a knowledge-framework to aid companies to easily understand that world of possibilities, appropriately named as “Technology Assisted Manual Testing”. Following are a few examples of the type of Test Engineering techniques and tools that belong to this very important category. We have found that a lot of Testing Teams need such awareness.
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Regular Expressions: The magical element “Expected Results”, as we all know, can range from simple singular values to oceans of text and beyond. Given this situation, there is always the need for an advanced “search/find” mechanism to swim through the textual data to find the patterns we want. It may please be re-noted that the “find functionality” available in most tools cannot do this. This is where, as some of you may know, “Regular Expressions” come to our aid. It may not be an absurd thing to say that any Software Engineer has to be aware of using basic Regular Expressions, which has HUGE productivity gains. Testing activities, especially on the results analysis front, can significantly benefit by applying this pattern-based language that allows articulating complex searches.
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OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools: For some really undisclosed reasons, the Dialog Boxes we see in most contexts prevent us from copying the text on them. We have seen Test Engineers wanting to extract the text out of these dialogs when they find that a print-screen/screen-shot does not suffice (for example, where some intermediate textual processing is involved) in their bug reports. What do they do? Use the eyes, hands, and the keyboard and perform the art of “typing”. As some of the smart folks out there would have already recognized, any reasonably well developed OCR tool can be used to extract the text out of image-based Dialog Boxes, as it is all composed of standard fonts in most cases. A Google search on “free OCR tools” should result in dozens of tools that have the capability to optically (really speaking, by pixel processing) recognize the characters in the images, Dialog Boxes etc. Test Engineers who see this highly simplified thing in action will perhaps will never let it go when they encounter relevant situations.
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Monitoring Tools: We take a risk of making a claim here. Any true and productive installation testing of Desktop Software Applications should have used tools like InCtrl5, RegMon, FileMon and their other friends in the family. Humbly stated, it is a very wrong thing to manually verify the files, registry keys and other things created (or erased) by Installer Packages. A lot of time-oriented productivity gains are our way by virtue of using these free monitoring tools that report on the File System and Registry information associated with installation/un-installation processes. The specific case explained here is just one example of situations that can benefit from Monitoring Tools. This well applies to the other OS level monitoring, network-level monitoring, application-level monitoring and so on, wherever possible. The gist is to try and search for monitoring tools even if the testing remains to be “manual”. Manual testing not equal to Manual Monitoring! |
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Not that these tools are applicable to all testing situations, but the stated direction of exploration reveals significant results in manual testing. Similarly, other “manual” activities like generation of combinations, test data (and the volumes and realistic-needs involved there in) can be other areas where this exploration process can continue to formulate a truly productive test environment. So, “Productive Testing” is therefore not a war just between Manual Vs Automated, but is about doing anything at hand in the fastest way possible. This perhaps even could challenge the general definitions of Test Automation that encircle Test Execution.
The map/list starts with the three specific engineering aids articulated here, and continues to grow into a full tree of “Technology Assisted Manual Testing”. This will be published, free of cost, to the world through our portal testersdesk.com when it is released later this year (end of July) but meanwhile we recommend the interested candidates to explore some of the lists at sources like testingfaqs.org and the public internet.
Happy Testing!
Ashwin Palaparthi
Founder and Principal Architect
ValueMinds Solutions Private Limited - Our business is about supplying knowledge or whatever to improve the awareness and productivity of our customers! |
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