The Inovis Blog

As we look at rolling out SCRUM across the Inovis universe there are going to be many factors contributing to our success, and one of those things is automation. We’ve talked about automation before, but I want to talk today about how we automate within the confines of the SCRUM model.

As previously mentioned, automation gives us the ability to do more work in a given timeframe or to do the same amount of work in a much-reduced timeframe by utilizing tools that simulate manual user activities. The tools help ensure that testing is done in a consistent manner because the scripts don’t change unless the product changes, and it allows us to do work more quickly because we can run multiple scripts simultaneously, and they run faster than if we were doing the same testing manually. Within the confines of Scrum, the goal is for each of the scrum teams to automate the work they produce within each sprint, thereby eliminating or vastly reducing the amount of time it will take to test those areas again in the future. Once the automation has been completed it does not need to be revisited unless the area of the application being tested changes, in which case the scripts are changed accordingly.

Some of the current products have a considerable amount of automation in place already, and that automation is being used to expedite the regression testing for those products as they are changed. Within the scrum model, the scrum team will need to ensure that the automation coverage does not dip below the current percentage, and then expand the coverage as new features are added to the product.

For the products that don’t have a solid regression test in place, the goal of the scrum team for that product is to continuously increase the amount of automated testing until we have achieved at least 75 – 80% coverage. This is an ongoing task that may take anywhere from 3 to 12 months for some of the products before it’s complete.

Regardless of the current automation coverage percentage, within the scrum model we will continuously automate everything that can be automated during the sprint cycle. For example, if a scrum team is using a two-week sprint duration, all the work that needs to be completed to meet the objectives of that sprint must be able to be completed during that timeframe. This includes the identification of the requirements in the form of user stories, the development of the code to fulfill the requirements, the development of the testing to test the changes or enhancements, and any other ancillary tasks that must be performed. The automated test scripts are included in this list of deliverables as well.

Nest Time: Discuss the “Definition of Done” and how automation helps us meet this designation.