Hatim Chahim
BIO
Hatim Chahim is an experienced program (test) manager with more than twelve years’ experience in IT industry and is currently working at ProRail. He has worked at the largest IT companies such as Capgemini and Accenture. Within ProRail, Hatim is responsible for managing large test teams at program level. At the program level, Hatim has developed test policies for test automation. Hatim has worked diligently to improve the test approach within the rail sector, making it both more accessible and functional. He is a leader in software and systems testing. He also gives training and consulting services about test automation tools.
Topic: Challenging TESTAR in an industrial setting
TESTAR has an innovative approach at the Graphical User Interface (GUI) level. We did a scientific research in the Dutch rail sector to compare this innovative approach to the used manual approach. We developed a scientific framework to enable this comparison. In this research, two perspectives have been conducted to investigate the sensemaking and technological value of TESTAR. ‘Sensemaking’ is the process by which people give meaning to events. TESTAR is a traversal-based and scriptless approach (without test cases) make it different from other GUI testing tools. Moreover, this tool it automates not only the execution of the tests, but also test design. Since no test scripts are needed, it is expected that TESTAR solves a significant part of the maintenance problem from which other approaches suffer. At present, a limited amount of studies has examined how effective, efficient, learnable and satisfactory the innovative approach is in an industrial setting. The results can provide sufficient information to help companies judge if a specific technology being evaluated will benefit their organization. Our case study compares the test automation approach of TESTAR to the manual test approach within a realistic industrial setting (rail sector) with a real mission critical web-based software application. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods are used to investigate learnability, effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Beside this factor we also analyzed the sensemaking of the test automation tool. The results show that within this setting, TESTAR was able to detect more faults and had a higher functional test coverage than the used manual test approach.