Automation Tip 7–Testing

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One of the great things about automation is the ability to achieve consistent results, same thing every time, but go careful. What happens for example if your automation task is incorrect, if it doesn’t achieve what you want it to do.

Guess what?

You will get the undesired result every time.  Or as I like to say, you will retrieve mass produced crap!

This is exactly why testing in automation is key, both functional and scale testing, what happens when you start working at a larger scale, do things still react in the same way, do you still get the desired results?

Sometimes testing will show areas where throttling mechanisms may need to be used, take for example the ability to create a virtual machine, when we automate this we may produce 10 virtual machines in the same timescale, maybe 100, 1000 or even more.  Does your hardware allow you to do this? How does the storage or the network or the IP management system manage working at this rate? Throttling may cause a slight delay in the process but it will certainly ensure everything is available for future workflows.

In summary, testing will help you be aware of your bottlenecks and stop mass produced crap!

More Automation tips

More tips from this series created by myself and Thomas Corfmat for a session at VMworld 2013 can be found below (updated as published), if you have a login for VMworld.com you can also watch the full session here.

Automation Tip 1 – Measure It!

Automation Tip 2 – Find your standards

Automation Tip 3 – Its all about people

Automation Tip 4 – Select the right mix of people

Automation Tip 5 – Simplify, Don’t automate a broken process

Automation Tip 6 – Automate incrementally

Automation Tip 7 – Testing

Automation Tip 8 – Documentation

Automation Tip 9 – End to end automation

Automation Tip 10 – Follow the “Automation Triangle”

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