My thoughts & after thoughts of my Step IN talk -

I am trying to recapture some of the questions from my talk today, and sharing more thoughts than I could in real-time.

#1 : Commercial vendors claim that they can offer end-to-end test automation, why did you choose to go the open source/custom way:

I stand-by my views that no software, commercial or open source, can come off the shelf and be deployed as-is, to offer end-to-end test process automation, completing your test infrastructure. These software no doubt have several great features, covering all major test tasks, but to make them work on your application/product, you need to have adapters/glue/interface/connector etc.

#2 : How long did you take to write this open source based framework and achieve this end-to-end process automation :

I narrated the context of my journey, with pulling-back-to-trenches-and-fortify instead of hand-to-hand combat situation. And that it took me 3 months, to achieve reduction of efforts from 60 man days to 3 hours. The discussion went towards, it may be possible in Product companies, perhaps not in services. I tend to agree and disagree, remember, with services you have one customer, with products we have a whole market out there, and not releasing products in right time can hurt us several millions of dollars. It is a proposal that we have to push for, regardless of our delivery model, and get a buy-in from the decision makers, objectively stating the problems, showing the RoI in absolute $ terms, and sharing a definitive delivery plan for putting in place the infrastructure. I took that as a mission facing a venture capitalist, pitching for investing in my ideas. And yes, I did the groundwork well, and went with a plan, and it worked. Definitely you can too.

#3 : I see PIT (Pre-Integration Testing) setup as a redundant setup after our Integration test setup, so should we invest in one more setup?

I think I should have answered this going from the reason for PIT's proposal. PIT is required ONLY when you have a large (>50) developer base checking into the same code base, with heavy simultaneous development, and symptoms like frequent build breaks. If the team is small, and build breaks are low, then you DONT NEED PIT.

Folks - Continue posting questions, on this presentation or the previous ones, I will be happy to take them up.