Skip to main content

Test Automation is not Automated Testing

I had more or less the same conversation with  Michael Bolton and Pradeep Soundararajan recently and both started with a statement about tool use and automation:

Pradeep:
@testertested: I help testers re-think what they mean by automation. I help them see usage of any tool as automation
@qahiccupps: any tool? A pen and paper is a testing tool..
@testertested: Yes, it does help you make notes, that you refer to for re-exploring the app. Do you see it that way?
@qahiccupps: Yes, a tool but not automation which, for me, requires action w/o my participation. Another: I can use Excel manually (enter formula into every cell) or automated (macros). Tool != automation.
@testertested: So, what about annotation pens and stuff ?
@qahiccupps: Used directly it's manual. Without me (directly) controlling, automation. Not sure if we're missing each other's point?
Michael:
@michaelbolton: Test automation is any use of tools to support testing.
@qahiccupps: pen and paper are tools that I use in testing. Can we regard their use as automation? If so, how?
@michaelbolton: Good question. In general, we refer to electronic machinery, of course. However, consider this aspect of all tools: "We shape (and choose) our tools; thereafter they shape (or choose) us."  McLuhan (with my parentheticals)
@qahiccupps: Agree w/that. But I'd hesitate to call anything that doesn't perform actions independently automation. tool !=automation. I can fill every cell in an Excel sheet by typing into them by hand, or I can write a macro.
@michaelbolton: Using Excel itself, however, is a fabulous example of test automation in the sense of any use of tools to support testing.
@qahiccupps: If I only write notes into Excel it's just like pen and paper. The use I make of the tool is key to whether it's automation
Michael has talked about this before in, for example, a blog on automation in ET:
Some people might have a problem with the idea [that exploratory testing can include automation], because of a parsimonious view of what test automation is, or does. To some, test automation is getting the machine to perform the test. I call that checking. I prefer to think of test automation in terms of what we say in the Rapid Software Testing course: test automation is any use of tools to support testing.
The copula verb, for all its slightness, makes strong assertions. In this case: if you use any tool while testing you have performed test automation. But what does the term mean? The Oxford University Press dictionary says this:
  • Tool: a thing used to help perform a job  
  • Automatic: working by itself with little or no direct human control  
  • Automation: the use or introduction of automatic equipment in a manufacturing or other process  
An anecdote from the same blog post describes some places where automation could be part of exploratory work:
[One colleague] got curious about something that he saw [in a program's behaviour]. Curiosity can't be automated. He decided to generate some test values to refine what he had discovered in earlier exploration. Sapient decisions can't be automated. He used Excel, which is a powerful test automation tool, when you use it to support testing. He invented a couple of formulas. Invention can't be automated. The formulas allowed Excel to generate a great big table. The actual generation of the data can be automated. 
I don't disagree with any of the assessment and I strongly agree that automation can be used to drive analysis and discovery, amongst other things. I disagree with the claim that (all) tool use is automation.

Tools need not exist at all in the tangible world. Shorthand is a tool, for example. Its utility relies on it being realised in some form by some other tool, say a stenotype or a nail dipped in blood. Although we might argue about whether these secondary tools are or can be automated, can the use of an ephemeral tool like shorthand itself be regarded as automation when the tool itself only exists inside the user's head?

Perhaps that's too obscure. Let's look at something more traditionally called a tool. I'm in the garden and I want to dig a hole. I have a spade but that tool isn't going to dig the hole by itself. It's unlikely that anyone would regard me digging the hole with the spade as garden automation. There's certainly a tool and there's certainly an efficiency to using it over my bare hands, but digging the hole is still manual labour.

In the Twitter thread above Michael said he was thinking of electronic machinery, presumably more generally as something that at least has the potential to operate independently. So let's think about a more sophisticated tool, one where the user does not directly manipulate every operation, but instead controls them by some higher level process. How about a car? It takes around two hours to drive my car to my mum's house. In that time many things happen without my explicit direction - the engine runs through its cycle thousands of times; shock absorbers compress and stretch to smooth out the ride; computers monitor various metrics such as oil level and temperature and report them to my dashboard. And some things happen with my direction but without my knowing exactly what physical actions are performed - I turn the wheel and I think there's probably some kind of rack-and-pinion technology implementing my request, but I don't know the details.

Is driving the car travel automation? Not for me, not by the definitions above. Although much in a car happens independently - to some level of granularity - I cannot leave the car unattended and expect it to get me to my mum's house.  Ah yes, but Google notoriously has a driverless car, you say. Yes, and there are functionalities that I would regard as automation in some of today's vehicles too: assisted parallel parking, for example. But even though Google's car can function in an automated fashion, if I got into it and drove it myself that would not be automation.

Tools, used appropriately, are capable of delivering advantages in areas such as reporting, visibility,  scalability, scope, quality and quantity of datacommunications, coveragechecking and numerous other things that are valuable to a tester. Automation requires tools. Some tools can provide automation. Not every use of such a tool is automation.

Michael was kind enough to read a draft of this post and commented:
We sometimes make provocative statements to get people to question their beliefs. "Any use of tools to support testing" is an encouragement to think expansively.  (McLuhan again, on his students: "I don't want them to agree with me.  I just want them to think.") 
People who respond to this provocative statement typically apply emphasis to the "tool" part.  What I'm more interested in is the "any use" part. The intention here is to stop thinking of the role of tools exclusively in terms of automated checks, and start thinking of test automation as "any use of (automated) tools to support testing".  In fact, James Bach and I are trying to avoid "automated testing" altogether, and say what we mean: machine checking, and tool-supported testing.  
For me, the strength of test automation is any use of tools to support testing, memorable and provocative as it is, is reduced by distractions around tools and their capacity for automation. I prefer this alternative: test automation is not automated testing.
Image: http://flic.kr/p/5GfNfo 

Comments

  1. I'd encourage you to think of something from a positive angle. It's more helpful, I've found, to describe something in terms of what it is, rather than what it is not. The latter is an infinite set. Test automation is not automated testing, true—but test automation is not a recipe for borscht, either.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Michael,

    I'd generally agree, but the positive restatements of your "Test automation is any use of tools to support testing" that I attempted felt more like definitions to me (example: "Test automation is the use of automation to support testing") and, while removing the mention of tools that I think weakens it, also lost the element of (thought) provocation that you were aiming for.

    You're right that there is an infinity of things that test automation might not be. But there is a much smaller set of things that could naively appear to be synonymous with it. In this case, I've made a deliberate choice to to refute an apparent (or at least potential) tautology to hopefully prompt deeper consideration. My hope is that that it would raise questions like: Really, why not? How is test automation defined? How is automated testing defined? Where do these two concepts overlap, if at all?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Really Wonderful Article. Thank you so much.

    Register Generator

    ReplyDelete
  4. "Test automation is the use of automation to support testing", -- I concur!!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can Code, Can't Code, Is Useful

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "If testers can’t code, they’re of no use to us" My first reaction is to wonder what you expect from your testers. I am immediately interested in your working context and the way

Meet Me Halfway?

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Stop answering my questions with questions." Sure, I can do that. In return, please stop asking me questions so open to interpretation that any answer would be almost meaningless and certa

Not Strictly for the Birds

  One of my chores takes me outside early in the morning and, if I time it right, I get to hear a charming chorus of birdsong from the trees in the gardens down our road, a relaxing layered soundscape of tuneful calls, chatter, and chirrupping. Interestingly, although I can tell from the number and variety of trills that there must be a large number of birds around, they are tricky to spot. I have found that by staring loosely at something, such as the silhouette of a tree's crown against the slowly brightening sky, I see more birds out of the corner of my eye than if I scan to look for them. The reason seems to be that my peripheral vision picks up movement against the wider background that direct inspection can miss. An optometrist I am not, but I do find myself staring at data a great deal, seeking relationships, patterns, or gaps. I idly wondered whether, if I filled my visual field with data, I might be able to exploit my peripheral vision in that quest. I have a wide monito

Testing (AI) is Testing

Last November I gave a talk, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API , at the BCS Testing, Diversity, AI Conference .  It was a nice surprise afterwards to be offered a book from their catalogue and I chose Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing by Rex Black, James Davenport, Joanna Olszewska, Jeremias Rößler, Adam Leon Smith, and Jonathon Wright.  This week, on a couple of train journeys around East Anglia, I read it and made sketchnotes. As someone not deeply into this field, but who has been experimenting with AI as a testing tool at work, I found the landscape view provided by the book interesting, particularly the lists: of challenges in testing AI, of approaches to testing AI, and of quality aspects to consider when evaluating AI.  Despite the hype around the area right now there's much that any competent tester will be familiar with, and skills that translate directly. Where there's likely to be novelty is in the technology, and the technical domain, and the effect of

Postman Curlections

My team has been building a new service over the last few months. Until recently all the data it needs has been ingested at startup and our focus has been on the logic that processes the data, architecture, and infrastructure. This week we introduced a couple of new endpoints that enable the creation (through an HTTP POST) and update (PUT) of the fundamental data type (we call it a definition ) that the service operates on. I picked up the task of smoke testing the first implementations. I started out by asking the system under test to show me what it can do by using Postman to submit requests and inspecting the results. It was the kinds of things you'd imagine, including: submit some definitions (of various structure, size, intent, name, identifiers, etc) resubmit the same definitions (identical, sharing keys, with variations, etc) retrieve the submitted definitions (using whatever endpoints exist to show some view of them) compare definitions I submitted fro

Testers are Gate-Crashers

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "Testers are the gatekeepers of quality" Instinctively I don't like the sound of that, but I wonder what you mean by it. Perhaps one or more of these? Testers set the quality sta

Vanilla Flavour Testing

I have been pairing with a new developer colleague recently. In our last session he asked me "is this normal testing?" saying that he'd never seen anything like it anywhere else that he'd worked. We finished the task we were on and then chatted about his question for a few minutes. This is a short summary of what I said. I would describe myself as context-driven . I don't take the same approach to testing every time, except in a meta way. I try to understand the important questions, who they are important to, and what the constraints on the work are. With that knowledge I look for productive, pragmatic, ways to explore whatever we're looking at to uncover valuable information or find a way to move on. I write test notes as I work in a format that I have found to be useful to me, colleagues, and stakeholders. For me, the notes should clearly state the mission and give a tl;dr summary of the findings and I like them to be public while I'm working not just w

Build Quality

  The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "When the build is green, the product is of sufficient quality to release" An interesting take, and one I wouldn't agree with in general. That surprises you? Well, ho

Make, Fix, and Test

A few weeks ago, in A Good Tester is All Over the Place , Joep Schuurkes described a model of testing work based on three axes: do testing yourself or support testing by others be embedded in a team or be part of a separate team do your job or improve the system It resonated with me and the other testers I shared it with at work, and it resurfaced in my mind while I was reflecting on some of the tasks I've picked up recently and what they have involved, at least in the way I've chosen to address them. Here's three examples: Documentation Generation We have an internal tool that generates documentation in Confluence by extracting and combining images and text from a handful of sources. Although useful, it ran very slowly or not at all so one of the developers performed major surgery on it. Up to that point, I had never taken much interest in the tool and I could have safely ignored this piece of work too because it would have been tested by

The Best Laid Test Plans

The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book,  Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester , which aims to provide  responses to common questions and statements about testing from a  context-driven perspective . It's being edited by  Lee Hawkins  who is  posing questions on  Twitter ,   LinkedIn , Mastodon , Slack , and the AST  mailing list  and then collating the replies, focusing on practice over theory. I've decided to  contribute  by answering briefly, and without a lot of editing or crafting, by imagining that I'm speaking to someone in software development who's acting in good faith, cares about their work and mine, but doesn't have much visibility of what testing can be. Perhaps you'd like to join me?   --00-- "What's the best format for a test plan?" I'll side-step the conversation about what a test plan is and just say that the format you should use is one that works for you, your coll