Startup Automation Recipe

Here is a short list of the testing ingredients needed to get a startup's automated testing up to speed. Do this cheaply and you'll have all or more of the capabilities of a large company at a fraction of the cost. My recommendations are designed to get your QA planning and testing up-to-speed quickly and cheaply and fall into three major categories.

I. Setting Up

1. Install test planning and results database
2. Install bug tracking database
3. Create a test script contract and automation standards
4. Create a testbed specifier

II. Automating

1. Automate product builds
2. Automate product installation, upgrade, revert, uninstall, and configuration
3. Automate testbed reset
4. Automate soak tests
5. Automate disruptive soak tests
6. Automate testbed triage
7. Automate performance regression tests

III. Automating the Automation

1. Create a test harness to run a batch of tests and email results
2. Create a web CGI GUI for viewing the test harness results
3. Run nightly regression tests from the test harness run from cron
4. Run nightly install/upgrade/revert/uninstall test from the test harness run from cron
5. Run tests on demand for pre-checkin testing run from a web CGI
6. Test new tests from a web CGI

I'll elaborate on these suggestions in separate posts.


Todd Shoenfelt
http://www.linkedin.com/in/toddshoenfelt