AbeachA Business Goal

Our business goal is, quite simply, to be the best provider of software test automation tools.  Unlike other vendors who make you do things their way, or use automation as a Trojan Horse to sell other test equipment and/or software, AbeachA has no hidden agenda.  Our mission is to give complete and total control of the software test automation environment to our customers, so that they can create a software test automation system unique to their business needs.

AbeachA Automation Overview

The AbeachA Ai21 is designed to control the execution of software test cases, which are commonly referred to as test programs, or test scripts.  The automated test case is the smallest (atomic), most reliable, and controllable level of testing.  Although test cases can be generated by 3rd party test tools, the Ai21 is more at home with test cases created by automation engineers. This is due to the fact that test cases designed and written by dedicated engineers are specific to business needs, more powerful, and more flexible than test cases created by a generic test case generator.

The AbeachA automation philosophy is based on the concept of controlling atomic test cases in any manner desired to achieve a virtually unlimited number of test scenarios specific to your business goals.

A successful software test automation system consists of three major components.  The first component is a scheduling mechanism for controlling the running of automation jobs on the test beds.  The second component is the mechanism that runs the test cases, collects the results, and generates a report, while the third component is the test cases unique to your business.

In the past, companies used engineering resources to design, debug, implement, and maintain all three components.  Aside from being inefficient and wasteful, this exercise does not fit in with today's accelerated schedules that require us to do more in less time with fewer engineering resources.  Realizing this, AbeachA created the Ai21, the Automation Infrastructure for the 21st Century.

The Ai21 fulfills two-thirds of a successful automation system by providing a robust, reliable, highly configurable and flexible software test scheduler and test execution environment.  By focusing engineering resources and time on the one-third portion of automation, the test cases, unique to your business, you will develop a successful software automation test system.  By creating and running test cases that control aspects of your test environment, the Ai21 quickly becomes a powerful, productive, essential, cost-effective tool tailored to your testing needs.

Since it would take over a year of engineering time and resources to approach the functionality and reliability of the Ai21, this time, and associated costs, can now be focused on your business goals.  Thus enabling a faster time to market with a higher quality product at a lower internal cost.

The following diagram illustrates a few features of the Ai21.

Mostly going from the left to the right on the above diagram, we see:

• Event (email) driven.
• Email can be from an automated software build system, an individual, or the web based interface.
• If a test bed is available then the job runs.  Otherwise, it goes into a queue.
• An automation job can request to be run on a specific test bed.
• An automation job can request the first available test bed of a particular type.
• The same test case can be simultaneously run against multiple test beds.
• As a test cases finishes the results are returned to the run tests program.
• Once all test cases are run a report is emailed to a distribution list.
• The report is also archived on a web-page for future reference.
• After the job is finished the scheduler is notified that the test bed is available.
• Test beds can be grouped by type; for example, Blue, Green, Red.
• Each test bed type can have 1 to 'n' physical test beds.
• Physical test beds (Green 1) can be sub-divided into logical test beds (Green 1.1, 1.2).

One final point is that the distributed design of the Ai21 allows the test beds to be remotely located.

Manual Control

However, no matter how configurable, flexible, and reliable an automation environment is, the ability to manually control it is an integral part of a successful software test automation environment.  For manual control, AbeachA provides a web-form and CGI program that allows custom automation jobs, consisting of individual test cases, entire test suites, and complete pre-defined test suite groups, to be executed once or 'n' times in any order.  Naturally, this manual control can override any default system configuration, and the source code (web-form and CGI program) is provided to allow customization for individual business needs.

The power and flexibility of AbeachA automation will be the standard for software test automation.