Steve Brunner, Director of Quality Development at InterSystems presented at MassTLC's automated testing event on June 12, 2013 at Brightcove, Boston, MA

1. InterSystems Test
Automation
Steve Brunner
Director of Quality Development

2. • Application Development Tools
• Caché – Fast Scalable Secure DB
• Ensemble – Integration Engine
• DeepSee – Integrated Business Intelligence
• iKnow – Unstructured Data Analysis Tools
• HealthCare Applications
• TrakCare – Electronic Patient Administration
• HealthShare – Aggregated Electronic Health Record
• Patient Master Index, Clinical Viewer, Active Analytics
InterSystems Products

3. • 1300 Employees in 6 continents
• Quality Development
• Independent of Product Development
• 60 people worldwide
• Mixture of Automated, Semi-automated, Manual
testing of all products
InterSystems

4. • Unit Tests
• %UnitTest is built into Caché
• ~80,000 unique unit tests
• ~47 Million executions in 2012 on 45 platforms
• Continuous Integration Testing - KingTut
• Build, Install, AutoTest every 2 hours with latest code
• If FAIL, nag all who checked things in since last PASS
• GUI Automation with HP Quick Test Pro
• We author tests using inhouse developed Framework.
Automated Testing

5. • Not free, not even cheap
• Automation takes time and people and machines
• Pick a budget, e.g. 15% automation, 85% manual
• Prioritize – can’t do everything
• Not enough time to write them or to execute them
• Do risk assessment to pick areas to automate, based
on importance, detectability, code author, or history.
• Semi-automation is OK, don’t force it.
• E.G. verifying visual details like “Button turns Green.”
Lessons:

6. • Best for trying permutations
• May need to glue things together
• Build, install, test. Lather, rinse, repeat.
• You need to pay attention to failures
• We developed our own tool for visualizing and tracking
test results.
Lessons:

7. • Unit Tests best written by original developer
• But often aren’t
• Make tests runnable by the developers
• Making them easy to run is important
• We switched from a 3rd party tool about 6 years ago to
an inhouse developed Unit Testing tool (%UnitTest).
Lessons