Your business is only as good
as the software driving it

Your business is only as good as the software driving it

Stop and think for a minute. What do you know about the systems your business relies on? Where do they come from? How do you know if something goes wrong?

“Perfectly correct IT” or “100% quality assurance” only exists in fairy tales. You cannot fully control and assure your IT operation. In fact, you don’t even know where all your critical business systems are or how and when they are being updated. You can, however, systematically reduce and manage the risk associated with your business-critical information systems.

This blog series discusses the approaches you should take:

1. Focus on risks and dependencies
2. Train your digital operations people in DevOps
3. Start viewing your IT investments as products rather than projects
4. Shift testing left – and shift testing right
5. Automate
6. Measure

Succeed from coding to production

Test automation is notoriously expensive to perform and even more expensive to maintain, even with the most advanced tools. Therefore, automation should first be applied to tests that are frequently repeated and infrequently changed.

Test automation, if done well, may save quite a bit of human effort. Bigger gains, however, come from time saved. In a best-case scenario, test automation can accelerate your testing by as much as 90% simply by eliminating waiting times from the process.

A testing job that takes more than six calendar days can be completed in a few hours by automated tests. The corrections in the code can be verified any time by just re-running the tests. The time saved in the feedback cycle is immense.

Automated tests are just part of test automation

In our point of view, test automation means:

1. Automating execution of the tests with Qentinel Pace
2. Automating preparation of test data with Delphix
3. Automating creation of test cases with PaceWords
4. Automating setup and configuration of test tools and environments
5. Automating installation and configuration of the system being tested
6. Automating reporting of test results
7. Automating analysis of test results and creating value
8. Automating reporting of test statistics and quality metrics

Just automate it

Deploying a comprehensive test automation should simultaneously be cost-effective. Now cost-effective does not necessarily mean it is cheap, rather it means that the solution should, scale bi-directionally, address majority of a business’s quality assurance needs, enable high productivity and low maintainability and reduce idle costs. Simultaneously, the test automation should keep its usability and robustness.

To minimize maintenance effort and cost you can benefit of two simple ideas

1. Write once but use many times. This is principle is heavily utilized in our reusable and easy-to-read PaceWords.
2. Do not use time in building and maintaining test environment. PaceRobots are cloud entities which are dynamically born in clouds, scale with need, execute efficiently and then disappear.
3. Easily readable software tools can put the power of test automation into the hands of non-tech business testers.