Modernizing the Manual testing with help of HP- Sprinter software

Manual testing practices have to be modernized.

Traditional manual testing has changed very little over the years. While organizations are increasingly

trying to leverage automated testing, manual testing still accounts for about 75% of all functional testing.

However, innovation hasn’t come into play yet and manual testers find themselves struggling to keep up

with the fast pace of change dictated by today’s world, using outdated methods and tools.

Manual testing should keep up with global market shifts.

We live in an “instant-on” world—a world where everything and everybody wants to be always connected and interact immediately with information and products. In order to deliver this instant-on experience, software development and delivery have changed dramatically, with more and more organizations adopting agile development methodologies, supporting a wider array of environments and configurations distributed across the globe. In conjunction with these market trends, organizations are expected to deliver faster than ever. On top of this growing rate of change, agile practices require accelerated testing and necessitate more collaboration. Relying on common detailed test design and planning no longer works. Unfortunately, if not revised, traditional manual testing practices will not allow testers to catch up with this growing demand to accelerate software delivery.

HP Sprinter software revolutionizes manual testing.

HP Sprinter, a new HP manual-testing solution, focuses on simplifying and expediting manual testing and increasing team collaboration in order to allow testers to answer the demand of today’s rapidly evolving world. HP Sprinter minimizes repetitive tasks, allowing quality assurance (QA) teams to test multiple environments and configurations in parallel. HP Sprinter automatically documents defects and according to customers has been shown to boost overall manual test productivity by 50–70% (customer testimonials are available through Techvalidate: see http://techvalidate.com/portals/hp-sprinter). HP Sprinter enables QA teams to accelerate the delivery of innovative technologies and solutions, supporting their business’ instant-on quest. Before HP Sprinter, testers were required to print test steps, input data manually from external spreadsheets, take notes during test runs, and type results manually into the testing suite. This tediously manual process was time-consuming and error-prone. HP Sprinter changes everything by being an integral part of HP Application Lifecycle Management (HP ALM) software and HP Quality Center software. HP Sprinter automatically logs test cases, test steps and expected results directly from HP Quality Center in a convenient tab-navigation view available at all times while the tester works on the application under test (AUT). At the end of each test run, test results and all relevant documentation are automatically saved to HP ALM or HP Quality Center, providing testers and other stakeholders with full traceability of test results to test cases, requirements and defects over a single system of record.

Facilitate agile testing.  
One of the most valuable capabilities that HP Sprinter introduces is the ability to log and document test coverage automatically, freeing testers from the verbose documentation they were required to maintain during test runs. HP Sprinter logs all tester actions and stores them in HP ALM in three formats: a video recording, a screen capture of all user actions and a textual description. One of the unique features of HP Sprinter, an innovative patent-pending technology, is the ability to translate user actions into a textual description, providing testers and developers with the most detailed test description generated automatically as testers perform their test. This intelligent auto-documentation can be attached to a new defect with a click of a button, facilitating better understanding of defects by developers and accelerating defect remediation. In addition, testers can utilize this description to create a formal test out of an informal test following the execution of a test run. The visibility of the test results to multiple teams, whether distributed or not, increases team collaboration and facilitates agile and exploratory testing practices. Agile methodologies promise faster development and  time-to-market; on the other hand they raise a number of challenges:

• Testing is expected to happen continuously as part of  each development iteration or cycle and not only at the end of development. This requires accelerating testing pace and testing in parallel to development.

• Testers should be able to test using less documentation in more informal ways but still be able to communicate a comprehensive defect description to allow fast remediation.

• Testers need to test partial applications and features instead of a complete final version of the application.

• User acceptance tests and unit testing should happen more frequently and quickly while still presenting test coverage in a clear way.

Embrace exploratory testing.  
These challenges lead to a growing need to implement practices such as exploratory testing. The main idea is to have testers use their creativity and experience after engaging with relevant stakeholders and understanding the business goals of the application and its main use cases. With a deeper understanding testers are able to rapidly explore the application to uncover defects. The main benefit is time-saving, both in performing the tests as well as in reduced test design and documentation. HP Sprinter facilitates exploratory testing by allowing comprehensive defect communication without requiring the user to document or rely on his memory and by allowing teams to fully understand test coverage, including exact timeline of user actions.

Minimize repetitive tedious work with data injection and mirror testing.

HP has introduced automation to manual testing to speed up and simplify repetitive work as much as possible. HP Sprinter provides a unique capability called “data injection” aimed to inject data automatically from an external spreadsheet to the application under test. This capability frees testers from the burden of manually inputting data into the application in data-driven tests. The “mirror-testing” capability will save testers precious testing resources and time by cloning the test multiple times on different environments and configurations, allowing the tester to run the test only once while HP Sprinter replicates the test on up to four machines at the same time, providing a great ROI.

Simplify testing with annotation and usability testing.

Another useful capability is the array of smart annotation tools allowing testers to easily and quickly take screen captures and annotate them, measure screen distance between UI components, check alignment of UI components and more. As always, this data can be easily attached to defects to allow developers to better understand defect description.

Design your test cases via HP Business Process Testing (HP BPT) software to allow reuse of test components.

 While HP Sprinter is more about test execution, HP offers organizations a way to ease manual test authoring by sharing test-case components between multiple test cases utilizing HP BPT for test design. Testers and business analysts are able to easily duplicate test-case components from one test case to another by quickly populating updates and adjustments to these test-case components via a user-friendly drag-and-drop UI, saving time spent on test design and test-case maintenance. 

Modernize manual testing.

By introducing HP Sprinter, HP offers a modern way to capture, plan and execute functional manual testing. The above mentioned describes the new HP approach to software testing, an approach that increases business agility and supports the modernization of testing practices to allow organizations to keep pace with the rapidly increasing rate of change and volume of testing that modern application delivery requires today.