Solution to Nancy Naive

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Nancy is new to test automation. The company bought a test execution tool and she was given the task of automating the manual regression tests. She was shown a demo of the tool and was very impressed with the capture replay idea, so she began recording the regression tests as she performed them for the current release of the system.


However, when the next release was ready, she found that many of the recorded tests didn’t actually play back or didn’t do what they should. She spent 2 days trying to fix the tests, and ended up re-recording some of them. She feels that this is too much time to spend on maintaining the tests! She is now concerned about what will happen the next time the system changes and wants to make sure that her test maintenance costs are kept to a reasonable level.

Exercises:

1) Go to Test Automation Issues Mind Map or Test Automation Issues Mind map with clickable links. Look through the Issue names and see if one stands out as Nancy's main problem.

2) Go to the Diagnostic. Answer the questions on Nancy's behalf and see if you find the same issues and patterns.

Solution:
Using the Diagnostic, there are two possible issues on the Diagnostic page:


Basically, Nancy should have thought about the design of her automation before she started, rather than jumping into capture-replay. She will probably have to start again and may or may not be able to use anything that she has recorded so far.