Wednesday, July 17, 2013

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.

2 comments:

Joe said...

My philosophy is that any change (and in particular any bug fix) has a high potential of introducing more bugs.
Hence, I would never trust such an automated verification system to close a ticket for me by itself.
I always expect my testers to "test around the bug" looking for other breakages, and unintended side-effects. This isn't something I'd likely trust to this sort of automation.

Robert Watkins said...

I certainly see your point. Maybe the better use would be to see this as a way to look for failed fixes and only look at it manually if the test passed.