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Been a while since I posted anything, so here is a couple of quickies.

 I'll be giving a Keynote at CAST 2007 on Testing Software Services.  Originally I thought of doing a double entendre about Testing of Web services and Services for Testing software like SDT's Unified TestPro® but I found there is so much more to say about testing of web services, that I will focus only on that.

 Google sponsored the London Test Automation Conference (LTAC) in Sept. 2006 where they videod lots of non-Google people talking about automated testing:     http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=LTAC&hl=en

I found this paper on “A way of Improving Test Automation Cost-Effectiveness”  in the free CAST 2006 proceedings, page 24, and thought it might be of interest (I also like their list of references).  It provides something I hear frequently asked for.
              It offers a viability analysis method, to help testers decide which tests can be automated cost-effectively.
In particular they reduce it down to a decision tree (see below).

I also liked “EPDAV – A Model for Test Case Definition” on page 50 for its clarity. 

Perform a verification,                             Vv
which may be preceded by a sequence of actions, Aa
which may require a set of data,              Dd
which may require preconditions,           Pp
all of which runs in environment,            Ee

Turning this notation around so that it can be read from left to right, we get:

A Test Case, Tt = Ee Pp Dd Aa Vv

The above is a different take on Expect This from Test Drivers (p5 on Test Impl Notes)

S - Setup
E - Execution
A - Analysis
R - Reporting
C - Cleanup
H - Help

An automated test case has SEARCH.  (From my 1992 paper How to Automate Testing – The Big Picture.  )

 And finally, page 133, “The Personal Test Maturity Matrix” (another flavor of Microsoft’s Career Stage Profiles or even the Testers Body of Knowledge, originally from James Bach, and adapted to BEA.)

  TestAutoDecisionTree.jpg