Automation of technical tests

We strongly believe that all software delivery organizations need to be making use of automated technical tests. This sort of test spans failover testing, performance testing and soak testing among others; these activities can start early in a project’s life-cycle and continue through to maintenance. The common practice of waiting until near the end of a project is fraught with risk with little time available to find and fix problems. For example the requirement for a comprehensive production-like environment before the start of performance testing is a dangerous fallacy, we can discover bottlenecks, track performance trends and test our performance tests, without waiting for a perfect environment.

Significant advances in the tools for automating functional testing haven’t been replicated in the technical testing space. Data management for performance, load and soak testing is a particular issue. However, the tools are improving and increased visibility for these tools supports the early and often technical testing that we advocate.