We now live in a world where testing and quality are becoming more and more important. Last month I had a meeting with senior management in my company and I made the statement that “quality is user experience”, in other words “without the right amount of quality the user experience will always be low”. And I think most people in QA and Testing will agree with me on that. Even organizations agree on that. Then, but why do we still see so much failures in software around us? Why do we still create software without the needed quality.
For one, because it’s not possible to test for 100%! A known issue in QA, but that’s not the answer we’re looking for. I think the answer is that we still rely too much on old-fashioned manual (functional) testing. As I explained in an earlier blog we need to go past that, move forward. Testing is part of IT and needs to showcase itself as a highly versatile profession. We need to be bale to save money, deliver higher quality, shorten time to market, and go-live with as less bugs as possible…
How can we do that? There are multiple ways to answer that, but one thing will always be one of the answers: test automation or industrialization. Tools should be a prerequisite for efficient and effective QA. It should not be a question to use them, but why not to use them.
The need for test automation has never been as high as now with Agile approaches within the software development lifecycle. New generation test tools are easy to use, low cost, or both. Examples I favor are the new Tricentis TOSCA™ Testsuite, Worksoft Sertify©, SOASTA® Platform, but also open source tool Selenium. And QA, and IT as a whole, needs to go further. Not only use tools to automate test execution, performance testing, security testing, but even more on test specification.
The upcoming Modelization of IT enables the usage of tools even further. We can create models and specify test cases with them (with the use of special tools), create requirements, create code or more. IT can benefit by this Modelization to help the business go further and achieve its goals. I’ve written about a good example of this in this blog on fully automated testing.
The tools are the prerequisite, but how can you learn more about them. Well if you are in the Netherlands in the end of June you could go to the Test Automation Day. They just published their program on their site to enable you to learn more about test automation.

