As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting much to this blog in the last year or so. I have had a lot of things going on in my life that have kept my attention from this blog.
So, what have I been up to? In January, 2010, I started work as a test automation lead at Polycom, working with the HDX video endpoints group. The video endpoints products have been around for a number of years, and several attempts have been made over that time to automate some of the user interfaces (not just graphical UIs), but most of these efforts were started by individual developers or QA engineers to meet an individual’s or small group’s needs at a specific time. Therefore, these these automation projects were not generally used very widely within the group and/or for not a very long time.
In 2009, the company decided to solve this problem by forming a dedicated test automation group, and that’s where I came in. In the past year, our automation group has had several successes: we’ve automated about half of manual tests via one interface, and we’ve started a good ongoing automation project for a new external input device that was just released. Furthermore, we’ve defined a new test approach for one of the other existing UIs (but we’re not actively developing tests on it at present) and we’re working closely with the architecture team to make automated testability a priority with some new development.
In addition to the automation work, I’ve been playing an instrumental role in QA tooling and reporting.
All in all, it’s been an exciting year, and I’m starting on a second year that looks to be equally exciting. I plan to discuss some of our testing efforts in more detail here in the future.