There are three steps when it comes to setting up test automation in your development organization: Creation, maintenance and continuous. While these three steps may seem straightforward, Mark Lambert, vice president of strategic initiatives at Parasoft, explained there are specific challenges that arise with each step.

  1. Creation: Here, organizations not only have to figure out how to create their test automation, but identify what things to automate because not everything can be automated, according to Lambert. Then, organizations need ways, practices and technologies to help them with the creation process.
  2. Maintenance: Once the tests are created, people have to consider how they are going to move forward with an Agile DevOps deployment. They need to maintain the test framework, make sure it is stable, and be able to make updates. 
  3. Continuous: One of the biggest challenges organizations face when trying to accelerate beyond their initial test automation practice is being able to run the tests any time, anywhere, according to Lambert. 

Parasoft will be going over these pain points in detail as well as what can be done about them at its virtual Automated Software and Quality Summit, which takes place Tuesday, Nov. 17. The conference will feature a series of 20-minute sessions from peers and customers who will share their experiences, challenges and how they addressed those challenges to ensure the delivery of reliable, safe and compliant software. There will be a 5-minute Q&A for each session for attendees to engage with speakers. Additionally, Parasoft team members will be available through social media and the online chat during the summit. 

“It’s no marketing fluff,” said Lambert, “it is all about the customer and about real-world experiences.”

Some presentations from conference will include:

  • A keynote from Diego LoGiudice, vice president and principal analyst for Forrester Research. LoGiudice will talk about the importance of test automation and how organizations can adopt that and get going.
  • Fitch Solutions, a financial intelligence firm, will talk about how they eliminated production outages and went from about 18 production outages a year to 0 in a 100-day period by adopting a high-quality practice.
  • Caesars Entertainment will discuss how they saw a yearly savings of nearly $1 million with the implementation of test automation.
  • Alaska Airlines will be talking about “testing the untestable,” and how they utilized service virtualization to really take full advantage of test automation and turn it into continuous automation. 

“We’ve focused much more on the problem first. Technology really is a secondary component. We are talking about real-world problems across industries,” said Lambert. “Everyone is trying to figure out how they can take advantage of the modern software development practices and apply it to their lives and their organizations so we are really happy to have this diverse community of not just different industries, but different people with different types of organizations.”

Learn more and sign up for the conference here.