7 Ways to Reduce Time-to-Test: Automation & Sharing

Yesterday we started to highlight some of our tips from the "7 Ways to Reduce Time-to-Test" paper, starting with how to simplify your testing environment and having access to stateful traffic to speed up the process. Today we excerpt numbers three and four. Number three has my favorite heading in the paper, "Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto", and talks about what to look for when automating testing including the importance of DUT automation, agile testing tools and even the testing tool GUI. The fourth tip gives some practical ways to gather and share testing knowledge with your community, whether internal or external. This includes using a wiki, sites like PerfTesting.org and even reports from organizations such as Sandvine.

Here is the excerpt or head over and download the paper here (no registration required) and let us know what you think, either here or on Twitter.

3) Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto

Manual testing will always be time-consuming and lead to more errors, not to mention that it will never scale to your lab’s needs. At the same time, legacy testing tools are complicated and difficult to maintain, often relying on dated scripting languages. Replace any testing tools that do not provide several levels of automation to help you “write once, test often.”

Automation should be intrinsic throughout your testing platform, particularly today when we all need to do more with less. When it comes to testing tools, some of the top time-saving automation capabilities include:

• Object-oriented Drag and Drop GUI: No one wants to take days scripting complex test scenarios. Invest in tools that help you quickly assemble the test bed components with convenient drop downs and drag and drop capabilities.


• Device Under Test (DUT) Automation: Connect directly to the DUT and you can eliminate manual power-cycle reboots or the need for a separate switch. You will also have the ability to develop sophisticated test scripts or use third-party software to execute tests and find bugs for those developers more quickly. This automation combination allows new tests to be created by recombining and, if necessary, easily modifying the components of previous tests. This allows a test engineer to connect the device under test, run a pre-saved test configuration and view the results.


• Agile Testing Tools: Conditions change rapidly in today’s dynamic networks so make sure your testing tools can keep up. Make sure you have access to frequent updates to test automation software, application protocols and security strikes, without additional licenses and forklift hardware upgrades.

4) Communal Thinking

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”

- Samuel Johnson

Gathering testing knowledge from a community of experts can help you reduce time-to-test. Your community of testing experts includes your own staff, the testing vendor, industry forums and more. Understanding and utilizing these stores of information can have a positive impact on your time-to-test. As you begin to gather this knowledge from other areas, one suggestion is to organize it for future use by storing tests and test data in a centralized repository, such as a wiki.

Some great examples are the reports from companies such as Sandvine, which tell you the make-up of traffic patterns that are out on the Internet. This data changes from quarter to quarter, so it’s best to keep a running history. Certain test vendors also provide this data so you won’t have to guess about traffic patterns when testing. Finally, there are sites such as perftesting.org where QA engineers from a variety of companies post information on the latest test methodologies, tools and techniques. Getting involved in these online communities will not only improve your testing, but also help you network.

Posted by Kyle Flaherty

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