What kinds of things should the QA team work towards?
What kinds of tools might we need to get there?
Goals I can think of are:
- Ensuring that "active" issues are high quality (non duplicate, full information to reproduce, etc)
- Providing regression testing prior to major releases
- Providing a way for "non-coders" to get involved in the project
- {your goal here}
Tools to investigate to support some or all of these goals:
SimpleTest, CoScripter, Selenium, DAST, SimpleTest Automation Framework
Tool for consideration: WebLOAD IDE, "...the authoring environment for recording, editing and debugging WebLOAD test scripts (http://www.webload.org/the-authoring-environment.html)"
It's part of Webload, which went GPL in April 2007. They were still weeding out portions that couldn't be GPL'd, so I'm not 100% certain that it's entirely free at this point, but could follow up with them. I used this tool extensively for load testing (http://interactiveqa.com/content/load-testing). It puts a proxy between your browser and the Internet. The script it records is Java Script, which you can edit and program, so that variables can change or even be pulled from external files. You can churn out serious scripts fast, and even customizing them is not a big deal. Pain threshold is likely very low compared with hand coding functional tests.
Hand testing: Thought should also be given to hand testing. We've found a lot can be discovered when testing isn't completely automated. When people poke around they might find things through combinations that programs won't. Even if we do decide to rely on programmed scripts, we should have multiple versions that combine various functions to find real points of failure.