Today, I like to write a little bit about usage of the automation or more specifically the use of programming.
You will find a lot of article about software testing strategies, and you can easily find the sentence "Exhaustive testing is impossible." And people write about equivalent partitioning and some related concepts.
Sometimes, this statements prevent me from thinking about executing all the possible inputs in my automation.
One of my test, I can get all the possible inputs from database. It's about 200,000 rows. Executing one test takes about 2 seconds including accessing the DB. Which means I can run all my tests in 400,000 seconds, which is about 1.8 days. And if I use several machines I can run them all within a day.
I had about 3 weeks to do my testing. Of course, I needed to spend time on other test cases but I did not even think about doing it all. I'm not saying that we need to try all the possible inputs for your testing or exercising all the test inputs would always give you better results. I'm saying we should not prevent ourselves from doing all because the data set is relatively large.
You can kick off your test and go home and check the result the next day.
Interesting things about programming is that automation really helps our testing. Machine cannot do testing but it certainly can helps us do testing. How much do you take advantage of the programming in your testing besides running your tests? You probably have multiple machines that you can use for your testing. Even your desktop machine can do something for you while you are at home enjoying family time. Are you under tight testing schedule? Do you want to lower your testing cost?
Actually you can get a lot of things done even if you're not sitting in front of the computer. Make good use of programming in your testing.
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