Belatrix Software Factory | www.belatrixsf.com 1

Case Study: From Manual Testing to Automated Testing



The Company. This Client is a leading supplier of
Enterprise
solutions,
desktop
software,
scientific
databases, and professional services for biotechnology,
drug discovery and chemical research, including software,
databases, and web sites which enable customers to
create, analyze and communicate chemical, biological,
and scientific information more effectively.
The Products. This Client’s
products are used primarily in the
pharmaceutical,
biotechnology
and chemical industries. They are
also used in higher and academic
education
and
government
research. The company's principal
software is the de facto standard
and primary communication tool
on the chemist's desktop. The enterprise version of this
solution enables information research organizations to
deploy application and information solutions using
Internet,
intranet, and extranet technologies. These
solutions are now in use by companies such as Abbot
Laboratories, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, etc.
The Challenge. With over 1,500 manual test cases,
the quality assurance process for the Client’s main
desktop application was quickly becoming very
challenging to maintain. The application was constantly
growing (more features were added) and we had to find a
way to reduce testing times, increase the amount of test
cases and improve the system quality overall without
introducing more additional testing time. Based on this
experience,
the Belatrix Quality Assurance
team
proposed to automate our testing process. Due to the
complexity of the application, we had to decide what the
best testing architecture would be. These are the
problems that have arisen:
• There are several automation tools available
(free and open source), but none of them provides a
complete solution. Even the licensed ones can prove to
be quite expensive and they confine you in their specific
architecture
and
scripting
languages.
• We could spend too
much time writing complex test
scripts, so reusability was very
important.
• We could spend too
much time maintaining scripts.
Based on these restrictions, we realized we had a
few options:
 Select a licensed tool
• Benefits: We could start creating scripts faster,
since we do not need to develop anything.
• Risks: The licensed tools could not meet our
requirements and we may not be able to adapt
the tool’s behavior due to the fact that we do not
have the source code. If the tool turned out to be
ineffective, much work would have been wasted
as it would have probably been developed on a
proprietary technology or language.



“With over 1,500 manual test
cases, the quality assurance
process for the Client’s main
desktop application was
quickly becoming very
challenging to maintain.”




Belatrix Software Factory | www.belatrixsf.com 2

 Select a specific free and Open Source tool:
• Benefits: they are free and we could add
more features as needed because we have
the source code. They tend to use popular
scripting languages, preventing future lock-in.
• Risks: we could spend too much time
creating scripts and maintaining them and we
should also develop several features to cover
our needs.

Use and combine several Open Source test
automation tools:
• Benefits: they have a low cost and we could
leverage a the best-of-breed approaches.
• Risks: some tools may not work well with the
others. However, this can be mitigated with
appropriate prototyping.
The Solution. Along with the client, Belatrix decided
that the best option was to follow the best approach and
select multiple open source tools combined with a custom
framework that allows us to:
 Reduce the time to create scripts.
 Reduce the time to maintain the scripts.
 Combine several automation tools in order to get
the benefits of each one of them while
circumventing their weaknesses.
 Develop special features that could be reused by
all scripts:
•
Take screenshots
•
Connect with a data base
•
Create automated reports
Some of the tools and technologies that were
chosen include:
 Python as a general scripting language
 Open STA
 DummyNet
 PyWinAuto
 Selenium
The Results. Belatrix helped the Client reduce the
test processing time by 40%, add hundreds of additional
test cases without affecting schedules and keep test
cycles under control.
Belatrix was also able to help the Client automate
the system deployment process, as well as the system
installation, installation testing, smoke tests, feature
testing
(including
integration with
other
tools),
performance testing and all the report generation to
produce reliable quality metrics.
Quality Assurance Outsourcing with Belatrix
Belatrix has an impressive track record providing
excellent Quality Assurance services to clients worldwide.
We cover the full spectrum of Quality Assurance
strategies, such as:
 Functional Testing
 Risk-Based Testing
 Graphic User Interface
 Acceptance, Usability and Accessibility
 Performance (Stress and Load)
 Regression

Installation and Configuration
 Security
 API Testing (N.Unit and MS-VSTester Edition)
 Automation (Python, VBscript, Apodora, Mercury
QTP)
 Smoke Test
We invite you to learn how a relationship with
Belatrix will give your company a distinctive
advantage through low cost, disciplined, and high
quality software development and quality assurance
services.
You may contact us at:
businessdevelopment@belatrixsf.com.
Phone number: +1 (801) 783-4269