An Instructional Designer’s Experience with Automation Testing

Harbinger organizes an annual event called Automathon. This event primarily focuses on automation testing, wherein participants write test scripts on given scenarios. Although I am an instructional designer by profession, I decided to participate in this event, owing to my personal interest in the testing function.

The Automathon primarily focuses on testing through an automated framework called Harbinger’s Integrated Hybrid Automation Framework (HIHAF). While dedicated professionals can undoubtedly do a great job at testing various scenarios, it is ideal that some part of the process is automated, to achieve massive turnovers. HIHAF is a great example of it. The framework requires quality engineers to write test scripts and it executes those scripts. So, although I knew I had a tool which could do half the job, the other half was to be done by me. I already had a sneak peek into writing test scripts; but what came as a big learning was manipulating the application to work with those scripts. When writing test scripts, you need to know why and how the application functions under certain conditions.

Before I participated in this event, I always felt that writing test scripts doesn’t require a great deal of programming knowledge. But what I did not realize was that one still needs to fathom well with the objects used in the software and their behavior. It requires understanding the processes and the environment surrounding these processes.

Apart from how I dealt with the writing of scripts, there were a lot of other takeaways for me from this event. I realized that it was just a beginning into the world of automation testing for me and I had a long way to go. I got to meet many people who have been doing really well in this area. It made me think of how frameworks like HIHAF could be beneficial to a wide range of industries. I found myself celebrating new ideas.

It left me with a lurking question, why don’t we embrace good things and ideas from other industries and functions upon whom we thrive, while working in our respective roles. What do you think?