Pull Up

Back when I was first working in automation, my AUT was a java based course player. Users could learn about how to be a good manager, how to shake hands in Australia, and a myriad of other soft skill topics. At the end of each learning session, the user would be given a 10 question multiple choice quiz on what they learned.

My job was to have my automation tool launch courses, answer questions, and confirm that the scoring mechanism in the app was behaving properly.

What made this particularly challenging to automate was that the questions were displayed in random order, and there were anywhere from 30 - 50 potential questions per quiz. So you never knew which questions were coming, or what order they were coming in.

I voiced my concern to my team lead, and she said that I should maintain a list of every question that could be listed in the course, and the answers to those questions. Now, that might have been ok if I were only dealing with one course, but there were dozens of courses I had to work with to ensure the app was behaving properly.

One of the things I learned early on was to "pull up," which is my way of saying take a breath, step back, and look at the whole picture. Is there a better way to handle this? What I realized was that somehow, the AUT knew what the right answer to any question was. If Choice C was right, then the AUT knew that. It was so blindingly obvious that I was ticked at myself for not seeing it sooner.

I went over to one of my developers and spent the next 10 minutes discussing my situation, my intended solution, and what was required to implement it. By the end of that afternoon, I had a method in place that would call out to the AUT and tell me which answer was correct for any given question.

It was a heck of a lot cleaner than maintaining a question/answer list, and it made for good "press" internally with automation. It also raised my developer street-cred, because folks saw that test automation was a lot more than just point&click record and playback.

So when you face a challenge in your automation, remember to pull up and make sure that you're not missing something obvious.