Interview of Yaxiong Lin, CTO, TestOptimal.com

Feb. 2, 2011 - PRLog -- QT: Can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do?

LY: As the company's technical architect, I am responsible for design and implementation.  Part of this responsibility involves continuous improvements to our products.  These improvements are brought about by enhancements and the addition of new features based on feedback and input from the professional test community like QT and from our clients. A typical day starts with a quick review of new issues and solution proposals. It is my responsibility to assess, query and schedule enhancements and additions and to ensure all valuable feedback is accounted for in our plans. Aside from that I manage the technical road map of our products, continually revising our releases to ensure that we provide the richest and most powerful feature set to the testing community. At the end of the day our products are intended to empower professional testers and provide a test platform that delivers superior testing capabilities that result in high quality software and so my eyes are across every aspect and every detail - I live and breathe what I extoll.

QT: How did you get the idea to develop your own product (TestOptimal)?

LY: Like all professionals in the software industries responsible for any aspect of testing I have had my fair share of frustrations over the limitations and inefficiencies of traditional approaches to test case generation and test automation. In my research, a few years back, I came across an article by Harry Robinson on Model-Based Testing (MBT). I immediately realized that MBT could be the solution to my frustrations in testing, a little more reading and research revealed that MBT was in fact an emergent methodology. Now looking at the many successes of our clients, I am more convinced than ever that MBT is the way of the future.

QT: Tell us briefly about TestOptimal tool?

LY: TestOptimal is a suite of model-based test automation tools. It is intended for functional, regression, progression and load testing.  The idea is that the same models developed for progression testing are re-used for regression testing and re-purposed for load testing. To my mind this is the essence and fulfillment of agility.  With TestOptimal, you start by creating the model with the simple Finite State Machine notation (aka state diagram) and write snippets of xml scripts (mScript) for each transition in the model. TestOptimal automatically generates series of test sequences to cover all transitions in the model and executes these test sequences on the application under test (AUT).

QT: Is TestOptimal compatible with any test environment?

LY: The short answer is yes.  The long answer is that TestOptimal provides a set of interfaces to integrate with other test frameworks and tools using a remote agent architecture.  This includes JUnit, XStudio, White, AutoIT, QTP, TestComplete, to name but a few.

QT: How can a Tester use TestOptimal and how will it impact his performance?

LY: Any test professional, from manual test execution professional to test automation engineers can and will benefit from TestOptimal. Test automation engineers can use TestOptimal to build a comprehensive automation test suite that requires very minimal maintenance and most importantly enables them to handle changes very quickly and effectively.  As I pointed out earlier MBT is to my mind the essence of agility and automation test engineers will quickly come to appreciate the speed and ease with which they can update models and re-execute their tests.

Manual testers can use TestOptimal to generate test cases from a model of the behavior they are interested in through the use of Data-Driven Testing techniques (built into TestOptimal) to achieve exceptional coverage. The interesting thing for manual testers is that writing and maintaining test cases will become a thing of the past for them as test cases are automatically generated and regenerated after model changes.  This is a significant point to note for manual testers as easily 30% of their available schedule time on projects is used for the purpose of writing and maintaining test case - now that 30% is eliminated and offers opportunity to either test more or test in less time.

QT: What are the most common performance related mistakes that you have seen in the projects (java applications)?

LY:  Design for performance is an art that requires creative and forward thinking.  Performance expectations are often overlooked during the requirement gathering and performance testing is often done towards the end of the testing cycle when it is essentially too late. Most of the common performance related mistakes I have seen are the result of poor design using multiple threads that inter-lock each other over shared resources and not using the appropriate granular level to communicate with the back-end services.

Applications not designed for performance are often required to be rewritten to achieve the desired performance which is an unexpected and expensive development effort that often causes major delays to the final release of the software.

QT: What is your advice to people who want to learn automated testing tools on their own?

LY: The easiest thing to do is to download the tool and go over the tutorials or user documentation.  I am a hands-on person and I learn the most by being able to try things out myself.  There are plenty of open-source testing tools and commercial testing tools available today.  Most of the commercial tools offer free trials and most importantly free technical support during the trial, so take advantage of that.  But before jumping into learning a tool, do your homework and assess the tool's potential and benefits in your work place and work context.

QT: What things should a novice tester do to enhance his/her automation testing skills for a better growth in the career?

LY: I would say keep up with the latest technologies and methodologies, do your homework and research continually. Being a tester, the value you can bring to an organization, is often measured by how fast you can turn around and complete your testing and further by how well you ensure the quality of the software you are asked to test.  Investing in new and innovative technologies enables you to do things that you were not able to do before.  You will be able to achieve results faster, better and more consistently than ever before.  Test automation is a software development activity; Microsoft, Google and many other large and forward thinking organizations have dedicated technical tracks for software testers that are equivalent to software developers'.  That is the future for software testers and you need to prepare yourself to live up to that expectation and challenges.

QT: What are the greatest threats right now to the software testing discipline? What are the greatest hopes for a brighter testing future?

LY: My personal opinion is that the software testing industry is bound in a box labeled  "traditional testing", being : manually hand crafted test cases and use/abuse of record and replay techniques. Many test automation tools offer record/repay. These techniques do not work in today's agile development environment.  We need to be willing to break away from that bondage and think outside the "box".  This often requires you to take some risk, but the reward will be overwhelming. Breaking away from the old traditional approaches and utilizing advanced techniques such as MBT (which by the way is not difficult as a technique) will deliver benefits to both the tester and very importantly to the employer who will measure the improvements to output in both quality improvements and dollars saved.

We hope you enjoyed our interview with Yaxiong Lin.

URL: http://www.qualitytesting.info/page/interview-of-yaxiong-...