Re-use, Re-Cycle, RePURPOSE

I was very impressed by the human mind's ingenuity in terms of giving a new purpose to old things, making them useful and alive once again. It happened during one of my trainings for a Belgian customer that wanted to see the newest testing product from HPE - LeanFT. LeanFT is a tool designed for lower levels of testing like Unit Testing, Component Testing or Integration in the small. Thus, it requires more programming and technical knowledge. One of the questions posed by the delegates, a question that is really worth analyzing was: "Once I finish these phases what do I do with the scripts? they become useless and I lose the investment?"

           The answer is Reuse (at maximum), then ReCycle them and REPURPOSE them. But before I will give you the technical answer and respond to "How you can do that" I will give you an example of human ingenuity regarding REPURPOSING. As I always say: brain is for creation and machines for execution.

           After each training I take a day off to rest, reflect and improve. During this day off I visited Maastricht, a very interesting city with amazing architecture and style. Just when I finished my visit and thought there is nothing more to see, an entrance to an old church caught my eye. I am not a fan of churches, actually I see a lot of empty space in them, a lot of stone used to enclose a huge volume of air which is not used, a lot of work and investment to build and maintain it only to use maybe 10 - 20% of the volume. At a time, it may have been useful for the ruling class but today? today I am impressed by the human ingenuity and their capacity for repurposing because when I passed the door of that church I was struck by the blend between a beautiful architecture and the usability of the interior. The building was full of life, full of knowledge and radiated good taste. Many people going here and there, filling out the entire space, motivated by the thirst for knowledge were giving life to what once was an empty space. They were reading books, searching for cd's, exchanging ideas with friends over a cup of tea or simply buying books. I think you've figured it out by know, the old church was repurposed into a bookstore. All the interior space was filled with bookshelves on three levels built on a metallic framework. The combination between gothic arches, cast iron and books inspired a feeling of savoir-faire! Congratulations to these people once again for being great. So much information in those books filling that huge space much like the enormous quantities of information filling in the huge storage space on our computers. I want to climb down from the top shelf at the third level with a book in my hand and get back to the LeanFT training and the question of what to do with those scripts once the unit testing phase is over. First let’s see what LeanFT does?  It is a lightweight and powerful Automated Testing solution built specially for Continuous Integration and Continuous Testing, aimed at technical automation engineers and dev-testers in Agile teams. The testers can create automated testing scripts in VisualStudio or Eclipse based on the descriptive programming of the object in your AUT. Basically, it recognizes and acts upon the objects on the screen based on the properties I am describing it in C# or Java. It helps me build tests very early in the SDLC while respecting the Test First principle from Agile. So, it is a good early start, it covers perfectly well the unit testing and component testing phases and it is flexible enough to be ReUsed as many times as necessary during these phases. But when these phases are over… What Next? Throw it away? I say NO WAY! ReCycle them as components in the test automation framework developed for the System Test. Recycling in this case means reintroducing it into the life cycle of the project as business components. HPE UFT & BPT (as many other testing tools on the market) have a repository where they store the properties of objects usually with the same description that I am using in LeanFT (the object is the same and has the same properties) so it makes almost no difference if I am writing these properties in the code or if I record them in the repository (recording is a facility for non-technical testers to translate a "click" into usable code). Once you add the corresponding input and output parameters you can RePurpose them as components in your Business Process Test. Thus, you make them useful until the end of life of that software or component.

           So ReUse, ReCycle, RePURPOSE all the scripts that you develop throughout the entire lifecycle of the test automation process. By doing that you will maximize the Return on Investment.

How to do that? please join my trainings and I will be happy to demonstrate :)