My Innovative Solution to Continuous Testing: Let Business Analysts Self-help Create Data in a BuildWise CT Server

A practical and innovative way of using End-to-End automation scripts with a Continuous Testing Server.

This is included in the “My Innovative Solution to Test Automation and Continuous Testing” series.

In the article, Benefits of E2E Test Automation and Continuous Testing (Part 3: to Business Analysts), I wrote, “Business Analysts (BA) are often among the first ones to realize the great benefits of E2E test automation and CT.” Why? Automation Scripts help create data scenarios for them.

Business analysts frequently want to get a particular data scenario in the application. To achieve that, they spend a lot of time using the application. It is very inefficient: slow, and error-prone. This is not obvious in the initial phase, as the app is relatively simple with limited functionality implemented. Along with the development, these data-creation activities will consume more and more time, not just for business analysts but also for manual testers and developers.

I once worked on an insurance claim application. Lodging a proper claim (with many different categories) could easily take 4 minutes even if every step was done correctly. After seeing that, I created a suite of automated scripts (in Selenium Ruby) to get newly lodged claim numbers for a few sets of scenarios, of which each took 40 seconds on average.

Please note that saving is more than 83% of the time (40 seconds instead of 240 seconds). It is actually more like 99%. Why? Because the BAs can perform other activities during the test execution.

After one business analyst found out using my automation scripts to help test data creation, naturally, I received requests from all the BAs for data, such as “a claim on contents only”, “home and content policy with over 1 million”, “a third-party motor claim”…, etc. Soon, the manual testers joined the club.

Suddenly, I became “the most popular person” in the team, receiving many Slack messages daily to create test data for them. I needed to come up with a way to handle the requests more efficiently. After all, I have…