Script Maintenance

Script Maintenance

By Renu Bala

Script maintenance is a great challenge faced by automation testers. As the course of development proceeds, applications undergo changes, which cause automation test scripts to break. For example, Developers change underlying attributes (like object name) that the test script rely upon to identify the object. So testers need to rework on scripts.

Script maintenance at some level is a fact of automation but too much maintenance can be a drain on team’s time, resulting in decreasing value of automation. Automation testing tool that build scripts that are resistant to breaking are extremely valuable.

Testers must constantly update scripts to handle minor application changes but testers may make mistakes when they update scripts.

One solution to these changes is to update the object map so that all scripts can reference updated object map and identify objects.

Second solution to these changes is Script Assure Technology introduced by Rational Functional Tester. This technology makes test scripts more resilient to changes in applications. With script assure technology, RFT evaluates the closeness of objects that it finds and attempts to match something that is closest. If objects are close enough, test continues with no intervention from tester and will log a warning so that tester is made aware of a possible discrepancy. So more tests can execute with less intervention, even with significant changes being made to objects in application. In this way RFT automatically finds changed target objects in application without object remapping. Benefit of this technology is reduced maintenance and more reliable scripts. Additionally, this flexibility is completely under tester’s control. Tester can determine what level of closeness is sufficient enough for the project

Info

http://www.qacampus.com

http://www.crestech.in

Software Testing

Australia