Thursday 2 July 2009

Automating Poets Day

"With an automated test script, correct execution does not present a challenge and a completely reliable test of test objectives is ensures. This also applies to situations where people tend to be negligent, for example on Monday mornings or Friday afternoons, when repeating a test for the nth time within a short period, or when the workload is extremely heavy. Automated testing ensures a greater degree of reliability than manual testing."

I recently read this as one of the benefits of Test Automation

Ignoring all the other aspects of it ( 'does not present a challenge', 'completely reliable' ), it was the 'negligent testers' part that made me chuckle.

Why stop at Friday afternoons and Monday mornings though ?

What if your testers are tennis fans - Wimbledon is on at the moment so they will have one eye on the matches and might be negligent

After that it's the Ashes - any cricket fans wont want to miss that just so they can check a few test results

The day after the office party wouldn't be a good day to run manual tests either

As for next year when the World Cup starts.... better make sure you have a months worth of automated testing you can do then

Oh yeh, make sure you dont write these automated tests on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning when you are feeling negligent


( for those that dont know about POETS Day - the BBC explain it here except that it's not really 'Push' but another word... )

2 comments:

anne-marie said...

I dunno, some of my best manual testing has been on poets days.

Gives you a different perspective..

Totally unprofessional advice of course, and I wouldn't recommend anyone follow it..:)

Phil said...

dont follow it unless you are a maverick tester ;)