In our global high-tech economy the long-running and sustainable success of an enterprise can only be achieved by continuous reduction of innovation cycles, product quality improvements and competitive pricing. If you run a high tech program it is likely that you therefore confronted with the following problems in your daily development work:

• The time you have available for complete and thorough system and verification testing is not sufficient due to project delays
• Continually changing product requirements make it difficult if not impossible for you to develop a complete set of tests
• Your product experts are not programmers and can therefore only indirectly assist with the development, maintenance and execution of system verification tests
• At any point during the project development lifecycle you have to make fundamental statements regarding the status (progress and quality) of testing
• You have to verify and supply complex systems and system enhancements according to a contractually binding functional scope and schedule

This whitepaper describes why it is beneficial to invest into test management and automation solutions and characterizes potential solutions for the problems named above.

So..Why is it beneficial to invest into test management and automation?
The business case for test management and automation can be illustrated in a simple way by the following diagram:

The diagram shows that the increase of the amount of features and requirements for products over time is accelerating. This phenomenon is driven by changes and improvements in the business processes of your clients or through the competitive situation of your markets. Under normal conditions you cannot simply deploy more resources or spend more time for testing, because price pressure, time-to-market and reducing innovations cycles demand shorter product development cycles at the same time.

You have basically only two possibilities how to react to this law of high-tech business:

• You introduce a partial test coverage, which is concentrating on newly added requirements and use existing test management and automation tools or
• You invest into advanced test management, automation methods and tools with more efficient processes and improved test tools.

Partial testing is the faster and easier implemented in existing organizations and tool landscapes but generally results in a higher inherent quality risk. Alternatively, the introduction of improved test management and automation methods with appropriate tool support requires thorough planning and adaptation of the particular situation of your department and is only possible to successfully be implemented with a significant amount of time and money. As in most things there is a tradeoff here which has to be assessed according to the individual circumstances, but long term solutions with automation usually prove to have the lowest total cost and risk. Time-to-market of you products, on-target development costs and high product quality are the key factors for market success. In the mid and long term you can only achieve the business goals of your enterprise through successful deployment of state of the art test management and automation methods and tools.

Anapasoft is often asked for the return of invest (ROI) of advanced test management and automation methods and tools. A study published in 2002 by the National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) Planning Report 02-3 helps to illustrate that incomplete and incorrect testing generates cost of about $5000 - $15000 per software development engineer and year in the USA. Based on our experience we believe that the cost of incomplete and incorrect testing of hardware products and integrated systems is in a similar range, because software forms an essential and integral part of all high-tech products today. According to NIST this calculation does not include the cost incurred at the clients when using faulty software products or systems.


Requirements for a test management and automation system
The following requirements have been identified by Anapasoft for a scalable, flexible and efficient test management and automation solution:

• Enables the development, maintenance and administration of all types of test scenarios, test documents and test activities
• Allows the development of complex test scenarios with a graphical point-and-click test editor, which does not require programming knowledge
• Supports the reuse of test cases already existing in an enterprise
• Supports the automatic execution of test cases and test scenarios in diverse testbeds or testbed configurations
• Allows the testing of multiple system interfaces within a single testcase
• Supports automatically executed regression testing
• Allows accessing the history of all test ever executed and their results
• Allows the display, tracking and monitoring of the actual test status and of the actual test results at any time
• Supports multi-channel access (PC, mobile phone, PDA, Blackberry, etc) to the complete information in the test management and automation system
• Supports secure and efficient collaboration between all testing team staff members, managers and clients
• Security, scalability, performance, reliability and availability of the test management and automation system meet highest expectations
• Supports integration with all relevant development and enterprise information systems and business process tools
• Supports importing and exporting of information and data via push / pull integration with legacy systems
• Offers the flexibility to be adapted to any test scenario or system technology to be tested through the support of:
  • Failsafe and uninterruptible in-service upgrade of the test management and automation system
  • In-service upgrade between standalone, client/server, hosted and ASP system architecture
  • Failsafe and uninterruptible in-service upgrade between named license, floating license and subscriber license models
• Support the system platforms Microsoft Windows, Linux and various Unix variants.