Personal Details

First Name

Glenn

Last Name

Halstead

Employer

BSKYB

Years Experience in Agile

2

Short Bio

I’m a test automation specialist. I’ve had an academic interest in agile development for several years and had the opportity to gain practical experience on a project at Agilent Technologies around 3 years ago. The development team adopted Scrum and we attended a 2 day scrum master training session. On this project two of us were test automation specialists but we also took on the automation of the overall development process including automated build / test, unit test framework, code coverage, complexity analysis, etc. One interesting lesson I learned on this project was that the highest value of the testing I performed was in providing information about the software to the developer as immediatly after his release as I could achieve. This feedback to the developer was more valuable than feeding up to the project manager (yes we still had one of those, the company was new to Scrum).

I’m not activly involved with agile projects at the moment but I do dip in from time to time with regard to test automation approaches. One example of this was a recent proof of concept showing that individual QTP gui control functions could be called from an Ant script run from Hudson. This approach meant that there were not two test controllers used in the project and therfore there was only one source of test input data, expected results, etc.

One of my current interesting challenges (right now) is to enable Hudson to report more than just Success or Fail for my automated runs of QTP gui system tests. I’m planning to create or extend an existing Hudson plugin to provide the following test outcomes in order to minimise the manual analysis required to move from a test result (pass / fail) to an analysed outcome (Pass, Fail, Script Error, Not Run - No Data, Known Defect).

History

Member for

1 year 14 weeks