Articles

[How can dumb monkeys built from free tools help you? Give this article a read to see a case study.  Originally published in Software Testing Professional magazine in 2008, these ideas and techniques are still relevant to SDETs, Technical Test Engineers, and Technical Test Analysts looking to build their own automation solutions using open-source components.]

Arrowhead Electronic Healthcare has been creating eDiarys on handheld devices since 1999. Arrowhead helps pharmaceutical research and marketing organizations document important information about how their products are being used in patients’ homes.

ePRO-LOG is Arrowhead’s third generation eDiary product. The primary design goal of ePRO-LOG is to be able to rapidly deploy diaries used for data collection in clinical trails and disease management programs.

A typical diary may include 100 forms translated in 15 or more languages, and used in several locales. This results in a large number of software builds and configurations.  As a result, we needed an automated test tool to address potential risks and to automate common tasks.

The most important quality risks we wanted to address were:

• Reliability
• Translation completeness
• Functionality of UI
• Input error checking
• Verification of requirements

We needed an automated test tool with the following capabilities and features:

• Address defined risks
• Produce accurate form-flow diagrams
• Reduce tedium and opportunity for error in manual testing
• Save effort associated with manual testing for these risks
• Improve time-to-market by reducing test cycle duration through 24x7 testing
• Provide auditable documentation
• Handle any screen flow or translation without custom test scripts (i.e., be trial-independent)
• Be easy to implement and cost effective

This is a case study in how we reduced our risks and achieved our test automation objectives in just a few months on a total tools outlay of $0.