Testing accounts for an increasingly large percentage of the time and cost of new software development: up to 60% in some environments. Using Automated Software Testing (AST), developers can reduce these costs, and optimize testing processes for the latest tools, languages, and architectures. As development grows increasingly complex, AST becomes even more indispensable. Now, for the first time, there's a practical, start-to-finish guide to implementing it successfully.

In Implementing Automated Software Testing , three leading experts explain AST in detail, systematically reviewing its components, capabilities, and limitations and present proven best practices for using it. Then, drawing on their unsurpassed experience deploying AST in both defense and the private sector, they walk through the entire implementation process-identifying best practices, crucial success factors, key pitfalls, and solutions for avoiding them.

You will learn to:

• Use Automated Software testing to improve quality, reduce cost, and accelerate delivery
• Make a realistic business case for Automated Software Testing, and use it to drive your initiative
• Clarify your testing requirements and develop an automation strategy that reflects them
• Decide what to automate-and what not to
• Build efficient test environments
• Apply configuration management to automated test scripts and related artifacts
• Document and peer-review your test cases
• Choose the right automation tools and techniques for your environment
• Build the skill sets your team needs to succeed
• Implement AST best practices proven in enterprise and defense environments
• Use proven metrics to continuously track your progress and adjust accordingly
• Integrate automated testing into mission-critical and real-time development environments
• Test system security and performance
• Use automated testing with open source systems
• Avoid common mistakes that cause AST initiatives to fail

Whether you're a test professional, QA specialist, project manager, or developer, this book can help you bring unprecedented efficiency to testing-and then use testing to improve your entire development lifecycle.