Automating COTS testing – Why it is important?

“How often do you face a situation where you just plug in your COTS software and it will do miracles for you. Very rare, right!”

COTS software often require to be tailored to your organisation’s unique context. For example, this may involve configuring business rules, building a business workflow, or building/configuring integration channels with other applications, and so on.

“This means, an additional overhead of testing!”

COTS Testing and Challenges Organisations have now realised that buying COTS software such as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, etc., will not necessarily reduce the test activities. With COTS testing, the paradigm has shifted to other types of testing that are typically don’t seen in in-house custom-developed systems. Further, when we talk about COTS, there is an underlying assumption that we can configure and release the software to the users swiftly. This sense of urgency will often leave less to no time for testing.

“The traditional way of completing COTS testing utilising expensive resource mix of functional analysts and business users, engaged in manually testing the customisation and implementation often lead to massive failure. Since this group is also challenged to work outside their normal job responsibilities this often leads to a significant increase in the testing timelines as well.”

Further, when we use functional analysts and users, due to the lack of native testing knowledge quality of test cases will also dilute. These tests could be mundane, repetitive, driven from the applications front end and they take days or weeks to execute. Testing like this is unreliable and not accurately repeatable. Feedback loop runs slow and therefore issues take longer to fix. This is an expensive task that you can only afford to carry out maybe only once per release. So, What can save us here? Test Automation can help. Test cases can be written to replace much of the repetitive manual testing. They can be written specifically for your context and only test features and functionality that your organisation has added or updated. Automating the redundant tests leaves your resources free to do exploratory testing on the software. They will have more time to adapt the tests to check unique business scenarios and use their functional expertise to explore the system further.

“ By utilising new-age test automation tools, organisations can even experience the benefits of true Agile and DevOps wherein testers can start testing the application alongside developers.”

These tests must be validating the implementation of your organisation’s business processes in the COTS rather than the core functionality of the COTS product itself. Perhaps the biggest hurdle for introducing test automation is that it requires developer expertise to build and automate test cases. Don’t let it STOP you. You can start with simple Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) specifications when you are working on your new features. Also, you can document your existing manual test scenarios as BDD specifications. BDDs can be developed without reliance on any developer simply prepares you for automation. Is this enough? Maybe it isn’t. With technology advancement, you can find new-age tools that do not need any coding language or do not have a script at all! Bringing automation to COTS products, enable rapid feedback to the development and implementation team, and transform days of manual testing into hours or even minutes. There are plenty of off-the-shelf products that provide automation capability (both free and commercial), and choosing the right one for COTS testing requires marrying the services they provide with the needs of the business.

“ In fact, you should look for a tool that works in a heterogeneous environment, be it your custom developed application, UI based applications, COTS applications, Web Services, File-based testing, IVR testing, etc.”

Don’t think of test automation as a tool only used by software houses. Think of it as a capability that can be used to test business processes that are key to your organisation. Automating COTS testing allows you to replace expensive manual testing with something repeatable and reliable. It enables faster and more frequent change. Start small and understand what types of tests add value to your COTS testing and for the overall organisation. Once the basics are in place you will spot even more opportunities where this technique adds value. If you’d like to know more about our perspective on automating COTS testing, connect with us via consult@enterprise-infotech.com.