# Infosys Whitepaper 
Title: Self-service Testing - The antidote for stressed testing teams 
Author: Infosys Limited 
Format: PDF 1.7 

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 VIEW POINT SELF-SERVICE TESTING: THE  ANTIDOTE FOR STRESSED TESTING  TEAMS Abstract Testing is a key element in the software development lifecycle that  ensures the delivery of quality products. As it has matured over the  years in terms of processes and tools, a recent trend from clients is  the need for ‘self-service testing.’ This point of view provides insights into client expectations and the  manner in which testing is being transformed from ‘process and  tools’ to ‘self-service’ mode.<|endoftext|>Today, organizations and testing partners prefer one-time  investments to build self-service platforms, and expect them to  be operational throughout the IT journey at the lowest possible  maintenance cost.<|endoftext|>{{ img-description : people looking at graphs on their laptops, in the style of soft edges and blurred details, silver and blue, use of paper, iso 200, mottled, hyacinthe rigaud, dotted  }}  

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 {{ img-description : three people who are focusing on a laptop, while two women look on, in the style of smilecore, expert draftsmanship, sky-blue and beige, hispanicore, progressive academia, contact printing, international style  }} Introduction New testing processes and tools are developed continuously to improve the quality of software. Today, the IT industry is  gaining momentum in agile deliveries and development and operations (DevOps), which is creating new possibilities by  integrating development, test, and operations teams. To keep pace with these changes, testing processes and tools need  transformation such that testing platforms can be accessible to all stakeholders and made simple.    External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited 

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 Factors driving self-service testing The diagram below highlights the challenges, opportunities, industry trends, and testing tools that are key to self-service testing.Challenges Organizations view testing as an integrated  activity of product development and they  tend to shorten the entire development  and deployment duration. This puts  pressure on testing teams to work in  parallel with design, development, and  deployment. At the same time, constant  ’requirement changes’ bring significant  amount of risk and rework before products  go live.<|endoftext|>Opportunities Agile methodologies and DevOps drive  synergies across business, development,  test, and deployment teams. They provide  good opportunities to enhance testing  processes ensuring that there is no  information gap and reduced lead times.  Open source tools and technologies  are other opportunities providing more  options to build automation frameworks.<|endoftext|>Industry trends  Agile software development Agile software development refers to a  group of software development method- ologies based on iterative development,  where requirements and solutions evolve  through collaboration between self-organ- izing, cross-functional teams. Scrum is the  most popular agile methodology.<|endoftext|>DevOps DevOps involves coordinating software  development, technology operations,  and quality assurance to make these  three, sometimes disparate entities, work  together seamlessly. It can streamline  business processes and add value by  eliminating redundancies.<|endoftext|>Testing tools JavaScript, selenium combined with  vendor tools are part of the “12 Test  Automation Trends for 2016” published  in https://www.joecolantonio.com/ that  are driving the test automation and will  continue to do so.<|endoftext|>External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited {{ img-description : a person typing on a laptop with graphs, in the style of free-associative, tenwave, precisionist style, 500–1000 ce, silver, associated press photo, simple and elegant style (bottom right) }} 

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 Self-service testing platform Testing challenges, opportunities, and industry trends explained above are encouraging test practitioners to find innovation in automation.  As a result, the industry is headed towards building a platform comprising of testing tools, custom frameworks, scripts to connect various  applications, and environments.<|endoftext|>The below diagram illustrates the concept of self-service testing.<|endoftext|>Common platform for unit, system integration, and acceptance testing The platform will provide an interface for developers, business, and test teams to provide input data. The input data can be steps or controls  that navigate through the user interface (UI) to complete transactions, simple actions, and data for a Web service call, or a mapping sheet to  verify the transformation.  The core part of the platform comprises of an engine with various automation tools, custom scripts based on the projects needs Selenium /  Java frame work to expose them through UI (or) as API services. This can be further integrated with mechanisms like Jenkins and Maven to  automate code deployment and invoke automated test scripts.<|endoftext|>It comes with an additional environment configuration panel to perform testing in DevOps, quality assurance (QA) and AT environments. A  user-friendly dashboard is provided to verify the status and results of the requests raised.<|endoftext|>External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited 

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 Benefits Self-service testing brings the following benefits in software delivery: Ready to use platform: Minimal technical knowledge is required. Business knowledge  is sufficient. Simple input to perform the business transactions, data transformation,  and validation.<|endoftext|>Single framework to cater to all testing needs: Self-service testing platform can be  used, reused by business, development team, and for post Go-Live testing as well.  Different environments can be configured and selected during the execution.<|endoftext|>Workflow automation: Workflow automation to execute batch jobs, perform the  outcome validation, and create reports.  Continuous integration: Continuous integration and development to invoke the  validation process as soon as the code is checked-in in an environment.<|endoftext|>External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited {{ img-description : couple in business suits talking with each other, in the style of light magenta and light amber, innovating techniques, smilecore, blurry details, august friedrich schenck, nul group, optical (pin background).<|endoftext|>}} 

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 Custom SOA Testing Framework – User-friendly excel to write down the  actions as test steps to form the central  test case repository along with a data  dictionary sheet to key-in the input data.  Check box option to execute the selected  test cases only.<|endoftext|>Success Stories A self-service testing tool  implemented for major retailers:  A Selenium framework was used to  integrate reports, download data,  extract data from the database, and  perform validation. The navigation  steps in the predefined reports were  saved as reused test scripts.<|endoftext|>External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited {{ img-description : a money sitting in a shopping cart next to a keyboard, in the style of primitivist frenzy, website, barbizon school, combining natural and man-made elements, digital distortion, hustlewave, yankeecore (Pin Background) }} 

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 Conclusion As various stakeholders are working  together to deliver business value within a  reasonable time, this single, common testing platform becomes essential to cater  to all phases of testing. This should prevent the duplication of the various types of  testing and its phases. A self-service testing platform will provide flexibility to adapt  to changes and enhancements and it will fulfill the testing needs across the software  lifecycles while maintaining the uniqueness of testing.<|endoftext|>{{ img-description : four business people posing together in a office, in the style of light yellow and light red, liquid emulsion printing, light gray and light beige, light teal and orange, back button focus, balanced asymmetry, dark white and light navy (pin background) }} About the 
Author References: Sri Rama Krishnamurthi Sri Rama Krishnamurthi is a Senior Project Manager with Infosys, having 16 years of software testing experience in various domains  like geographic information system (GIS), finance, retail, and product testing. He has been practicing business intelligence (BI)  testing for more than nine years now. Test data management (TDM) and master data management (MDM) testing are other areas of  his expertise.<|endoftext|>•  https://saucelabs.com/resources/webinars/test-automation-trends-for-2016-and-beyond •  https://www.cprime.com/resources/what-is-agile-what-is-scrum/   External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited 

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 © 2018 Infosys Limited, Bengaluru, India. All Rights Reserved. Infosys believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice. Infosys  acknowledges the proprietary rights of other companies to the trademarks,