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The Evolutionary Journey of ‘Harmony’ – The Next Generation Test Automation Accelerator

By Dharma Sagar Pathaneni,

How it all started?

The current test automation world is undergoing a sea change. Unlike today, earlier, there was no accuracy and back then ‘test harness’ was missing due to the lack of an integrated management system in place. But, in the current trend, where new gadgets and devices are coming up every day and with users accessing your website or applications from a variety of devices, real app development can only happen, when the design strategy supports all platforms. So, we need a scalable test automation framework which best serves our robust test automation needs, across multiple platforms and all under one umbrella.

Unarguably, the past traditional testing methods will not fit in today’s much Agile, continuous delivery and DevOps environment. Repeated software-development tasks are becoming automated through the application of Continuous Delivery and DevOps, hence traditional testing methods are fast losing their relevance.

The Emergence of a NextGen Test Automation Accelerator by ‘Harmony.’

Keeping in focus, the current automation challenges faced by the industry, Innominds’ Test Automation Centre of Excellence (COE) has built ‘Harmony’ an open source, robust test automation platform, which allows you to create, manage and execute test automation effortlessly. It saves a significant amount of cost and time, offering an increased test coverage. Built with a ‘design-right’ approach and customizable abstraction, Harmony provides the flexibility for a wide range of users with varied skill sets, making continuous validation a reality thereby, helping for a client’s digital transformation initiative.

Earlier, the test automation environment was much like Automated testing – it simply involved the process of conducting specific tests via automation. For example, a set of regression tests, as opposed to conducting them manually. There were many challenges, like developing the same set of reusable components multiple times, thus complicating the maintenance. There have been times where the process of tracking the test automation coverage across the projects was not efficient. Also, the traceability of automated tests for defects was never feasible, as defects were reported manually with reproducible steps which took lots of time, hence defeating the very purpose of Automation.

At this point of time, Innominds’ Harmony proved to be a scalable and a well-optimized test automation solution which facilitated for higher reusable components, increased test coverage, coupled with a greater test harness power and an integrated management system in place, Harmony truly made continuous integration and continuous validation a reality.

Harmony offers an array of testing types across a wide range of industries, digital technologies and applications. It leverages open source tools, and it can seamlessly support test automation for web, desktop, mobile apps and multiple types of APIs.

 How Harmony support test automation of applications - Step-by-step approachHarmony, over a period of time, as a result of market-driven changes and high-quality innovation, is now equipped with 200+ reusable components, significantly jumpstarting test automation objectives for both ISVs and enterprises. The framework supports integration with leading test management tool such as TestLink and CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, it integrates with Jira - automated defect tracking & reporting system.

The other key features of Harmony include, the ability to support ‘Parallel Execution’ both, On-Premise and On-Cloud and it integrates with build automation tools. TestNG facilitates for a distributed and parallel testing. Harmony has a comprehensive reporting feature and the reports can be automatically emailed or generated over the internet and can be sent to your mobile too. It supports all leading browsers such as IE, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Moreover, Harmony facilitates an extended support for Desktop app and Backend systems support. Harmony provides the flexibility to develop and manage test automation at various levels depending on the end-user skillset.

Continuous Validation

There is much more to add above the test automation scripts, which is mainly the root cause for most of the ineffective or inefficient test automation. This is where continuous validation fills the gap. Harmony supports the continuous validation by running the tests on incremental builds. Above this, it is also important to validate the validations. If you are running ‘n’ number of tests for an hour on a daily basis and if these tests did not identify a single bug for last 3 months, this means that we need a way to identify passive test cases and replace them. Harmony Reporting offers various features which enable the project managers to understand the right time to improve the test automation effectiveness.

Harmony improve the test automation effectiveness

Orchestration

Orchestration tools are turning significantly important and are becoming fast popular playing a key part in the test automation process. They facilitate admins to focus more on critical tasks, rather on the routine steps progressing through a workflow.

The very objective of orchestration is not just to automatically execute a service, bringing speed to the deployment process, getting applications in a ‘faster-production’ and ‘market-ready’ mode, but it also gives an opportunity to streamline, to optimize those processes for even greater gains in deployment velocity and increasing faster release cycles. Here, the Harmony test automation accelerator provides just that, in a very efficient manner – it not only does the work of test automation tool, but it also optimizes the whole test automation process and even controls it.

Reporting

Another striking feature of Harmony is its ‘Data Visualization’ capacity. Harmony in sync with iFusion – an advanced analytical, intelligent collection & edge computing platform built by Innominds can help businesses visualize large dashboards with live reporting, metrics and analysis. These single-reports view of dashboards basically highlight the key snippets at one glance so that you can take prompt, corrective business decisions. Once the reports are generated, an automated email notification is sent along with the reports.

Using Harmony, we were able to validate hundreds of product releases from the past decade, across both the enterprises and small/medium businesses. So, the NextGen platforms are equipped with Intelligent Dashboards using Analytics for root cause analysis, code coverage and other metrics supporting an end-to-end comprehensive functional/non-functional testing.

Overall, Harmony has transformed itself into a robust test automation platform (and it will continue to do so) as it has been helping clients across various domains and geographies gain significant advantage by reducing their test cycle times, increasing test coverage thereby saving enormous time and money, improving test quality & time to market. Harmony helped clients gain a digital excellence, realizing their digital transformation dreams. I will be talking more about ‘Intelligent Reporting’ using Harmony in my upcoming blog.

Topics: Quality Engineering

Dharma Sagar Pathaneni

Dharma Sagar Pathaneni

Associate Vice President - Quality Engineering

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