Building a test automation infrastructure to improve testing efficiency and effectiveness is a complicated set-up activity that takes in to account number of projects, testing methodologies, tools used, platform coverage, available hardware and software resources, frequency of test execution, short term goals, long term vision, skill sets of the engineers and the time that will be spent on development and maintenance of the infrastructure.

This tutorial session describes our journey in building test automation in the Small Business Division of Intuit India Development Center. This journey begins with automated test suites run on remote infrastructure there by impacting productivity of the product development and QA teams to establishing the local test automation infrastructure that increased automated test efficiency and effectiveness. The infrastructure set-up is based on the concept of running developer build tests (DBT), Feature and Sanity Tests (FST) also referred to as enhanced Smoke Tests and Build Acceptance Tests (BAT). In this tutorial the authors will be sharing such a test automation infrastructure that has been deployed in Intuit India and the continuing journey towards becoming a matured test infrastructure in terms of automated test case management, execution, machine pool administration, user group management, automated build detection and test case execution, centralized results reporting, On-Demand automated testing, Developer build tests, manual testing support, optimal use of hardware resources through virtualization technologies and providing the framework for further tools integration and enhancement.

This tutorial would be helpful for QA Directors, Managers and Engineers who are looking to establish an automation infrastructure or are looking for opportunities to enhance their existing automation infrastructure in terms of better resource utilization and centralized test automation solutions. The authors will also present various components of the system in detail that will give insights in to how the test infrastructure is organized and used. This will be helpful for the audience to leverage from the knowledge gained about the infrastructure and discussions on the merit/de-merits of the system as a whole. The author will also share key lessons learnt including metrics while setting up this test infrastructure for test automation and highlight key benefits from establishing such an infrastructure while scaling up to multiple geographic locations, supporting multiple projects and tests which in turn created the demand for more automated testing.