Test Automation for Bug Fix Verification

Recently, I've been looking at Behavior Driven Development. The gist of this approach is that you write stories that describe your system behavior (or desired system behavior) and then feed that into your test system.

Here is a sample story.

This highly-structured (plain English) format can be parsed and used to direct your automation code. Originally, this was meant as a way to describe new functionality.

But consider this. Suppose you wrote stories like this for the expected behavior as a part of each defect report. Additionally, suppose you had a system that would:

• go through each fixed defect for a new build
• extract any attached story
• run that story through your test automation system
• if passed, close the ticket
• if failed, attach a screenshot/log file/etc. of the failure

How much time would that save? How much quicker could new builds be verified?

I'll be giving this more thought and come up with something I hope finds its way to a future blog post.

OK SPIN - Summer Meeting

Wednesday, July 31st, 6pm

201 David L Boren Blvd University of Oklahoma South Campus, Norman, OK 73072 ‎

Come to the Summer OK SPIN meeting. At this meeting, we will look at an approach to producing software that has lots of interesting features:
- Can be applied to agile as well as waterfall approaches (even when there is no process!)
- Supplements (or establishes) clear documentation of system functionality
- While there is programming support for this, you can still get a benefit even without using the technology side.
- This documentation becomes direct input to system testing, requiring no human interpretation once the testing framework is configured.
- Changes to documentation are immediately available for system testing
- There are programming tools (including IDE plugins) to streamline the process of using this documentation for system testing.
- The testing output uses the original documentation to indicate which tests pass and which tests fail.

(Can you guess what type of tool this is?)

From 6pm to 7pm, come and mingle with other software professionals.

From 7pm to 8pm, we will have the presentation.

Hope to see you there!

https://plus.google.com/events/cdhb06s2kncfm2ch2chc32q93b8?partnerid=gplp0&authkey=COfpg_7Xlq-JGw