Static or Dynamic Testing - One framework to test it all!
About the Speaker
Bringing with him an experience of 16 years, Balamurali L is currently working as the Director of Quality & Testing Group, SFO Technologies Software Division. He has core competency in the areas of Test Automation, quality assurance and control. He has played a lead role in implementing various Test automation frameworks and quality models like CMMI Dev V1.3, and ISO9001:2008, Automotive SPICE, ISO 27001, ISO 26262, IEC61508 and ISO 13485. He is a CSQA & CQSPE from QAI, a Certified Tester (advanced level- Test Management) by ISTQB) and a certified Test Manager by Department of IT, Govt. of India. He plays an active role in the core group of the Trivandrum chapter of Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN). He has also marked his presence in various International Conferences like QAI, STC, and ISQT by presenting papers in concepts of CMMI High Maturity, Software Testing and Automation, Quality Assurance etc.
Software Testing is one of the most important as well as the most chaotic phases of the software development lifecycle. The hassles teams face when their software has been developed but isn’t yet in a position to be shipped to the customers have bothered one and many. With the advent of continuous delivery, the focus has shifted to Test Automation so as to attain maximum test coverage in the independent testing phase within minimal time. Balamurali L, with his 16 years of experience in testing and quality assurance, has been there and done that. He brings with him a barrage full of valuable knowledge about how the testing lifecycle can be integrated with the Software lifecycle to get early returns. Having seen all the problems that grip the testing world and the incremental testing requirements of a huge product, Balamurali started developing a home-grown framework, a one-stop solution for all testing requirements, christened NeTAF (NeST Test Acceleration Framework).
NeTAF is a Continuous Integration (CI) framework which integrates all aspects of static as well as dynamic testing in a single shell. All types of functional testing, performance testing, stress testing, as well as code coverage and static analyzer tools can be run simultaneously and iteratively. This provides a healthy respite from finding bugs at the last stage of delivery and creates a sense of confidence in the product quality by executing tests at regular intervals. Bala further explained the requirements for creating the framework and how NeTAF was being used in his organization to ensure continuous testing. NeTAF works on a high-end server, which is the most important requirement of the framework. The server is configured to pick the source code from the repository at a predefined time. The high end server, which is connected to various Virtual Machines, then builds the debug build and a release build. The debug build runs through the UI Automation cases, code complexity, and code coverage tools. The release build which runs in parallel on a different machine is subject to Performance testing, load testing, and other tests that form a part of basic level of functionality testing and help in uncovering deviations in workflows. Yet another machine runs the static analyzer tool in parallel. Each automated test generates a report of its own, which is then transferred to the high-end server and can be used to get important insights.
Bala’s ingenious attempt at integrating the development and testing cycles has helped his organization unearth bugs early in the product lifecycle and find gaps in the development. The framework was well appreciated and embraced by not only the testing community but also developers who utilized the framework to have a level of confidence in their code before checking it in to the repository. The talk left many participants in the conference enthralled as they put forth really interesting questions to Bala and he, in turn, answered each queries comprehensively. The talk proved to be a definite curiosity raiser. It seemed as if he managed to inspire most of his listeners to create similar frameworks in their organizations to make testing more aligned with the speed of development.
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This sounds very interesting and useful. Wondering if this framework is for Desktop apps or mobile apps? Any pointers to know more about this framework and if it's open for other companies to use?