Now, it's Chinese Spring Festival! Most of my colleguges went back to their hometown, to enjoy their family life. Not like others, I stay in Shang Hai. The reason is much more complex, but one is that my Mom came here, acrossed the distance of 1/2 of the China, 1/4 of the earth, 1 day and 1 night by train. But just yesterday, she went back to her home city. And I had to see her off at the Shang Hai railway station. After that, during the way to my apartment on the metro, I was deeply went into the situation of thinking. I even doubt if I was in a dream, but looks I can hear the train still running.
Why we need the test automation?
To anwser this question, we need to find out what's the purpose of test automation, in other words, what's the goal. I would like to use three words to discribe this concept, release, regression, intresting. Release, this means that we use test automation to release the human resource from the redundant and repeated work, to do other activities. Regression means that the automation's goal is not to find bugs, it's major purpose is to ensure there isn't any regression, ensure there isn't any bug, in another word, ensure the feature works fine. Interesting, note, I use intresting, because from my own points, if I always manually execute testcase/scenarios, there wouldn't be any challenging, I love developing, I'd like to make use of coding and benifit the testing process.
Actually, in a large project (>2 year's life cycle), everybody are really careful of their own features/areas, the progress could be move only all the other's works. So, if one blocked, it will block the entire progress. So, the automation in other words help to measure the progress, when we have a reasonable/acceptable pass rate, we will trate this a valid build and, we are safe to move on.
Why need to run all the automation tests for a particular fix?
The reason is that, you don't know if the fix works for a particular feature, even the particular works you can't gurantee if the fix won't impact other code, even it will impact other code, you can't foresee how large area if will impact, also don't believe the results of developer's suite to be a good trend. You are representing the end user, the customer, please treat the product as yourself's.
What are the techniques of functional testing?
General, Boundary Condition, ECP, State Testing, etc.