Solution to Owen Optimistic

Owen has recently been put in charge of the test group. He was formerly a development manager and is very keen to bring the test team along and get test automation going, as the testing has been mainly manual. So the first thing he did was to call the team together and announce that he had authorised the acquisition of a test tool, which he had heard glowing reports about from some friends in another company. He assured the team that he was 100% behind them in introducing the new tool, and had generously given them 3 months to “get up to speed”.

However, when the 3 months were up, Owen was very disappointed and frustrated. He had thought that by now all of the manual tests would be running automatically overnight and for every build, but it seems that there are still lots of manual tests that haven’t been automated yet. Even worse, the team are already complaining about software changes that are “breaking” the automation - he is sure this shouldn’t happen. But the worst thing of all is that he has just been told that a bug was found in something that had been tested by automated tests! How can this be? He feels that he has already invested time and money into automation but it hasn’t given him the benefits he was convinced would be there by now.

1) Look at the Test Automation Issues Mind Map or Test Automation Issues Mind map with clickable links. Which issue(s) would best represent the problem(s) Owen is currently facing?
2) Using the Diagnostic, what are the issues that best describe the problems that Owen is facing?

Solutions:

• There are a couple of possible issues in Owen’s case.
  • HIGH ROI EXPECTATIONS (Management Issue) may be the most appropriate issue for Owen, since he clearly expected to get more benefits for his investment by now.
  • UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS (Management Issue) may also be a relevant issue, since Owen’s expectations were not realistic.
• Using the Diagnostic, what are the issues that best describe the problems that Owen is facing? There are a number of possible issues that could apply to Owen’s situation.
  • NO PREVIOUS TEST AUTOMATION (Management Issue) - there is lots of good advice here that Owen would have benefitted from looking at earlier!
  • Assuming that Owen wants to “improve or revive your test automation”, the most appropriate heading is “Management expectations for automation not met”. Here we find both of the issues above (UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS and HIGH ROI EXPECTATIONS). Both of these are relevant and contain useful advice for Owen.

For example, let’s look at UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS:

• The list of expectations matches a lot of Owen’s ideas, so this is probably the most appropriate issue for him.

(Note that the next step would be to look at the recommended Patterns, but that is not part of this exercise.)

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