Tuesday, April 12, 2011

How IT deals with Test Automation ...

Here is a short post on how test automation is dealt in IT/IT services organizations.

For example : A typical test cycle:

Before Automation -- (AS IS statistics - documented)

Number of Manual test cases = 300
Time taken to execute these test cases = 10 Person days
Tester's productivity = 30 Test cases per day (derived data)

After Automation -- (Assume 150 of these test cases are automated)

How do you think test cycle would look like?

Number of test cases Automated = 150
Number of test cases requiring manual effort = 150


Time taken for 300 test cases = Time for Automated execution + Time for Manual test execution

= (how much time will 150 automated test cases will take to complete) + 5 days (with 30 test cases per day productivity)

= 1 + 5 (assuming that automated tests run at 1/5th of time of manual execution)

= 6 days

Hence a business case will be developed to justify automation investment

The business case would say - with automation, we can save 4 person days of testing effort per cycle. Depending upon how many cycles of testing are lined up - we can break even the automation investment.

Oh... What a great feeling ... This is what I see all day in and out..

Let me tell you one thing .. executives, managers love this stuff ... so neat - objectively stated in numbers, justifying in terms of monetary terms why we need automation.

But some discomfort and terrible feeling in me ... what you people think - we are missing here?