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Bug Automation

In many of my clients, more effort is spent on 'test automation' than on other forms of testing or quality assurance. That can be the right choice, for example, I worked on a Data Warehousing project where we needed to write some test automation before we could test the data and its processing. Many other projects in different technology areas also spend a lot of time on their test automation. To be precise, they spend an increasing amount of time fixing & maintaining old 'tests' and 'frameworks'. There are great tools around to help us write these automated checks quickly. But as with many software systems: maintenance, in the long term, is where the time and money goes. That is why I'm surprised we don't use short term automation more. We have the skills. One good example of short term automation is Bug Automation . A simple script / executable that recreates or demonstrates a bug. This isn't a new idea, I've been doing it for year

Test automation that helps, A Guardian Content API example.

Have you ever had to test an API that's accessible over the internet? or even one thats available internally within your organisation? They often take the form of a REST service (or similar) through which other software can easily access information in a machine readable form. Even if you are not familiar with these APIs, you've probably heard-of or seen the results of them. Some examples of APIs are the Twitter API ,   Flickr  and the Guardian's Open Platform . Some examples of what people have built using the Flickr API are published on the flickr site. Despite being 'machine-readable' they are often human readable, greatly helping you test and debug them. Companies use these APIs to ease the distribution of their content, encourage community and commercial development around their content or to simply provide a clear and documentable line between their role as data-provider and where the consumer's role begins. When testing an API like the above, many