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George and I in the Boat or a Summer Story from the Cape
Last month was my birthday. Thank you very much! So, my family bought me a gift. You guessed right, a boat. Since Julia cannot stand the smell of gasoline and I have no clue how to sail, the choice was easy: a $50.00 inflatable boat that holds four (my family) and a set of paddles for another $10.00. Julia, three year old Danny, and our English Cocker Spaniel Sasha, decided to watch us from the safety of the beach, while the macho men (George, 12, and I) hopped in and took it for a spin.
It took me a few pushes to get to the middle of the bay. At this point George asked me if he could try it. I gave him the paddles, explained the basic rules, and he went on paddling for the first time in his life. After five minutes wrestling with the paddles both of us were wet, but the boat did not move an inch.
This would be a good place to send me your joke.
Danny was pretty excited to see all this commotion, and judging by Sasha's barks, the rest of the family liked my present. On the other hand, George wasn't so happy. All the way back he was complaining that it looked so easy and fun when I paddled. It was even described as easy on the label of the box. But he could not do it and hated the entire exercise.
Click here if this sounds familiar.
Of course, I could not miss the chance of giving my son a lecture on how you never trust a label, and how everything comes with the experience and dedication, and then things become easy and fun.
As I look back at the last two years of meeting with the companies who are in the process of or already tried implementing automatic testing, more than 90% of them resemble this story. Here are just a few good reasons not to have a successful automation implementation:
1."They" told us the tool is extremely user friendly and everyone in our manual QA department would become automation guru after reading the manual.
At qaSignature, our consultants are required to learn the manual by heart and go through a three month boot camp before we might consider them entry-level QA specialists.
2. The tool will do all the work for you! No programming required, and even a kid can do it. Just record the actions and play them back.
At qaSignature, our QA Architect has a PhD in computer science and more than twenty years of development experience. No one is allowed to face a client with less than five years of coding experience and a boot camp training.
3. If you send your entire QA department to our training and buy licenses for everyone in the department, automation testing will just fall into place.
Our clients do not even have to consider buying testing tools licenses for the first month of our engagement. We start producing tangible results in the first three days of the project. By the end of the first month, our clients have automation architecture in place and they can decide if buying any particular testing tool makes sense. As far as we are concerned here at qaSignture, why would you want to pay for someone reading a tutorial to you if you know how to read yourself?
I could go on for a couple of hours with variations of these statements, but the bottom line is that out of 300+ companies that I have talked to, I was really impressed with a handful of companies that have done a great job with automation and can test the entire product line within 24 hours and not worry about quality.
Epilogue
I really hope that my boys will use the boat and never put it back on the shelf in the nice box it came with. This goes to all my friends out there who need to take that tool off the shelf, and convert it from shelf-ware to test-ware. I hope that they are successful in their struggle with today's rough economy (i.e., no money, not enough people, and pressure to get that quality product out of the door within 24 hours' notice).
An Interesting Fact
If testing tools are so easy to use, as any tool vendor would like you to believe, how come 60% of the same vendor comes from servicing this tool?
Your comments
Thank you very much for all of your e-mails, words of encouragement, and all the replies to my first newsletter. Just the fact that I received 37 e-mails in the first day shows that you care!
Russian Language Class
Samovar - a device for boiling water and conducting rituals of drinking tea in Russia. Original version used wood or charcoal as heating elements. Usually, the ritual of drinking a few cups of tea takes about 2-3 hours. We sit outside and talk politics, business, family, etc. We did not bring the samovar with us, but we still keep this good tradition here, at qaSignature! So drop me a line and stop by for a cup of Russian tea.
Enjoy the rest of the summer…and stay tuned for the next newsletter.
Vlad Shamis
Founder and CEO, qaSignature
About qaSignature
At qaSignature we are dedicated to help companies who are committed to reducing testing time to 24 hours.
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