The Inovis Blog

David Rodriguez will soon be joining our blogging team and recently submitted me this piece on Automation.

Inovis is continuously striving to become a bigger and stronger force every day. One of our biggest weapons at the moment is automation. Our automation process has saved a lot of time and sanity. If your company is looking to gain more efficiency, perhaps automation is a good solution for you.

Traditional testing includes writing test cases, executing tests by hand, and recording results. We are currently using automation for Inovis Catalogue, BizManager, Inovisworks, TLE, and will be starting our automation process with Inovis Webware shortly.

We have tools with our automation process that are related to our quality center that allow us to do something once, record the steps that we took to do them, and then automate them. We either run a script or use a program that can simulate the manual process.

This process is extremely valuable. It allows us to do a lot more work in the same amount of time, or do a lot more work in a lot less time. For example, with BizManager automation, we’ve got a process that would require forty hours of manual work, and that’s the platform certification. There are about a hundred and twenty combinations of that, so if we were going to do that, it would take two years for one person to get all of the platforms certified manually. We have automated the process, and the initial results are about 85% time savings. We can also run multiple threads of that at once, so in a week’s time, I can automate everything, and do way more than I could ever possibly imagine doing if we were doing it by hand. That helps us validate that the software is of the quality that we want it to be, and it helps us certify for the Sales and Marketing folks, and for the Product Managers that we have the validation that it works on all of these platforms. I can tell someone like Joe Boyle, “You can go sell this because we’ve tested it, and it does what we said it was going to do, and it meets all of the requirements on all of these platforms, rather than just the one or two platforms that we’ve been able to use for testing.”

Automation is also going to be used for regression testing. Any time coding is changed or a program is changed, there’s likelihood that something else you didn’t think was going to change was, in fact, changed. In this circumstance, we use automation to perform regression testing. This is the process of going back and seeing what shouldn’t have changed and making sure it didn’t change. We make sure it still works right. Our Inovis Catalogue is using automation for regression, and BizManager is going to be undergoing that process next. TLE is next in line after Inovis Catalogue.

There are a lot of things we want to automate, because we don’t have enough people to do everything. If we had an endless supply of hours and resources, we could do a heck of a job. Automation will put into place solutions that are very stable and competitive. If I were testing a web page, I could do it once, record what I’m doing, and automation would pick it up and do it a thousand times faster and better than I could ever do it by hand. It will leverage the effort of one pass or two passes through, and get a whole lot out of it. And, as we look at growing the company with acquisitions and other strategies, we’re going to need to be able to do a lot more work, a lot more new things, and still maintain what we currently have and do. So, we’re going to need the automation in place to help that happen.

Our other big use for automation at the moment is outsourcing testing. We have several offshore engagements going on at the moment, and we’re trying to figure things out through automation.

As you can see, automation is doing a lot for our company’s progress.