Letting Your User Scenarios Define Your Tests

Julianne Maerlender

Testing from version to version is a critical part of release readiness for your organization. Testing the product ensures that users are aware of changes that have been made to key areas of the system before going live. Historically, organizations have reported that they spend a large amount of time manually testing with each release. Since testing is critical part of validating each new version, consider using automation to replace the repetitive tasks being put on already strained resources.   

 

 Automating your user scenarios has many benefits; quick feedback, reliable, consistent results and well documented testing artifacts. When you start out to create an automated suite of your User Acceptance Tests, you need to first clearly define and document your organizations specifications or workflows. To determine these for your organization, it is best to first look at the common usage of the product.   Find out what your end users are doing in the application, what are their important workflows, what are their important processes that they need to be successful.  Start your research by looking at what is done most often - build a list with a small description of all the things that happen daily, who does the work and what the expected outcome is – these will guide your user scenarios. This list may be items like update constituent addresses, enter pledge payments, or track interactions.  Once you have identified a critical feature, break it down further and define most important scenarios. Then take that list of scenarios and prioritize it.  What is the most important critical features across multiple users or with large impact to the organization – this is what you should be automating first. Once you establish the daily critical needs, repeat the exercise for weekly, monthly, and annual tasks as each group will have high priority items that have a big win by automating.

 

A common industry standard for documenting your scenarios is to use Gherkin, an open standard text layout for scenarios used in testing software. Gherkin tests consist of steps, also known as Givens, Whens  and Thens. The purpose of Given is to put the system in a known state while the When describe the key action a user performs during the test and finally the Then validates the end result. This allows your tests to not only be written as scenarios that follow your users patterns, but also are living documentation for your organization’s processes.  Once you have created your scenarios, you can automate them using the Custom Specflow Generator and core APIs provided with Blackbaud’s UAT Automation Kit.   Using this tool will allow your organization to quickly build out a robust suite of automated user scenarios to run at every update and reduce the amount of time spent manually testing.

 

More information on Blackbaud’s UAT Automation Kit can be found in the Blackbaud Community as well as an demonstration of using the tools will be highlighted at the March Spotlight call.