Efficient And Maintainable Test Automation

Abstract: More and more companies experience problems with maintainability and time-consuming development of automated testing tools. The MPC department at Ericsson Software Technology AB use methods and tools often developed during time pressure that results in time-consuming testing and requires more effort and resources than planned. The tools are also such nature that they are hard to expand, maintain and in some cases they have been thrown out between releases. For this reason, we could identify two major objectives that MPC want to achieve; efficient and maintainable test automation. Efficient test automation is related to mainly how to perform tests with less effort, or in a shorter time. Maintainable test automation aims to keep tests up to date with the software. In order to decide how to achieve these objectives, we decided to investigate which test to automate, what should be improved in the testing process, what techniques to use, and finally whether or not the use of automated testing can reduce the cost of testing. These issues will be discussed in this paper.