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A few common objections
to automation:
- Most skilled hand testing is not pre-planned in detail,
but is rather a guided exploration and reasoning process.
- Once a specific bug is executed a single time, and
no bug is found, there's only a remote chance that the same test, executed again, will find a bug, unless a new
bug is introduced into the system.
- For GUI software, it is very hard to automate that
process so as to automatically notice all categories of significant problems while ignoring the insignificant problems.
- All automated test suites require human intervention,
if only to diagnose the results and fix broken tests. It can also be suprisingly hard to make a complex test suite
run without a hitch.
- Any bug that goes unnoticed when the master compare
files are generated will go systematically unnoticed every time the suite is generated.
- Hand testing and Automated testing are two different
processes. Because the dynamics are different, the bugs they tend to reveal are different. So, a direct comparison
in terms of dollar cost or bugs found is meaningless.
- Most analysis of the cost of test automation completely
ignores the special new tasks that must be done just because of the automation.
A few common benefits of
automation:
- Using automated tools can free human testers for
following their hunches, the more creative, right-brain and free-form part of testing. If the automated tools can
test the routine, strait forward parts of functions, this can minimize the repetitive nature which characterizes
much of testing today. (This is the "don't think, just test" school of testing.)
- Better handling of multiple drops caused by iterative
development.
- Manual run-time versus automation run-time, automation
run-time IS shorter.
- Value is multiplied through reuse.
- When a product is about to ship and it is necessary
to test all of the product features on a number of machine configurations, varying in installed memory, video boards,
disk space, processor speed, brand of computer, and other types of configurations, having hundreds of significant
automated tests ready to run can be extremely beneficial.
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