Rolling out a radical shift in test automation through a multi-release project management approach

This paper examines a multi-release program management approach to bring in a radical shift in test automation strategy for a telecom project. The existing test automation using GUI automation tools was found inadequate and as regression test effort was increasing, the team came up with an in-house framework to GUI test automation. The paper describes the challenges in roll-out and how project management concepts were utilized to bring in a new test automation approach. How building of a prototype and its refinement through iterative processes helped to bring in a new technology is analyzed in this paper. The paper provides details on continuous integration methodologies employed and the rapid acceleration of test coverage that followed the prototype. How the approach was tweaked in each release to finally reach the goal of making automation an integral part of the development process and enable the team to have tests ready when a feature is ready is also covered in the paper.