New Era of migration from Keyword Driven Testing to Business Process Testing
New Era of migration from Keyword Driven Testing to Business Process Testing
Being a part of evolution, the software industry migrated to test automation from conventional manual testing. However now the time has come when the industry is approaching another milestone of Business Process Automation. BPT is another step ahead of Keyword Driven Automation testing.
What is the new approach all about?
In this emerging approach of Business Process Automation, the Functional Subject Matter Experts find the automation frameworks more handy & meaningful due to their continued involvement right from the beginning. This way the test automation process turns towards being more business driven.
The new approach involves role mechanism wherein subject matter experts, in-spite of having no knowledge of programming are able to create, data-drive and execute manual / automated tests with great ease. This helps in
bridging the quality gap between subject matter experts & test automation engineers.
What are the key advantages of Business Process Testing approach?
With this new approach the testing organizations can beat the competition by adapting themselves with the latest industry practices due to the following:
1) Testing assets like keyword components etc. – once created, can be effectively utilized across different applications and by multiple testing teams
2) Test automation & its documentation can be combined in a single structured & meaningful effort.
3) As compared to keyword driven testing, it requires lesser resources and consumes less time.
4) Helps in automating the process of maintaining test cases and documentation related to test plans
5) Helps in combining test automation and documentation in one effort.
6) Better understanding of business priorities both by business analysts and test engineers reduces the non-value adding test rework.
7) Organizations can begin quality assurance efforts quite earlier in the application development lifecycle.
8) Since we shall be using keyword driven testing, the test automation process can go on offline, even much before the application flow has become sufficiently stable for recording.
How should software industries migrate to Business Process Automation?
Migration to BPT tools from conventional means is a quantum jump for the software testing organizations. Although appears simple, it is quite tedious & requires that the organization should have mastered the implementation of Keyword Driven Testing methodology first. Implementation of BPT becomes fairly easy in the organizations, if keywords driven methodologies are already in place.
Testing organizations are able to derive tangible savings in terms of time & money only when they do extensive reuse of keyword components across multiple applications.
Majority of organizations these days have already shifted from development of client server or mainframe applications to web based application. While many organizations have already begun the process of converting their legacy systems to web applications. Hence going by the industry wide change, the testing organizations must first of all implement keyword driven automation framework for Web-based applications, before going in for Business process testing.
Once a robust keyword driven automation framework for Web-based applications is available in the organization, the set of test assets like application independent keyword components can be reused without the need for building them from the beginning, thus new web application can be quickly automated.