The Department of Veterans Affairs, serving a population of over 15-million veterans takes a flexible approach to automated software testing. The agency operates a multitude of applications in multiple stages of the lifecycle from cutting edge to legacy, some of which have 800 web pages to them. The VA relies on a quality assurance operations team to manage testing of these applications, using a homegrown tool that has been enhanced over the last decade.
The Quality Assurance Operations team, referred to as QA ops, uses what they describe as very basic tools for automated testing, including plug ins into their browsers, recording automated test scripts, while others are more complex, commercial off the shelf products.
Todd Coppinger, an IT supervisor within the Office of Information and Technology software testing, and manager of the Quality Assurance operations team, said the purpose of his team is to try and standardize the automation testing process across the different product lines.
“We have approximately 600 applications in the VA and each product line uses their own different automated tools that suits their needs. It’s not a one tool fits everybody’s needs because we have older legacy systems, new systems, mobile devices. . . We use a homegrown tool that offers a wide gamut of modules, that adapts to a wide range of testing requirements and platforms,” Coppinger said on Federal Monthly Insights – Automated Software testing.
The QA ops team refers to their tool as the automation tool interface. It’s a suite of open source libraries. The framework can be maintained locally, including on a mobile device all the way to the enterprise level. The team can conduct testing on a large number of applications that include legacy terminal emulators, mobile devices, APIs and web-based products.
Coppington spent a large part of his career in the private sector, and now has a team of six developers at the Department of Veterans Affairs, each with 10 to 15 years of experience writing test automation scripts. He explained that he has an affinity for using open source technology that he has been able to bundle together into the framework. One benefit of the QA Ops team’s use of the open source libraries is financial.
“There is a common set of code that is shared among the 55-plus product lines that are currently used in the framework . . . This common code saves product lines six months of upfront automation script writing. It handles all the complexities of finding components on an application page. We’re saving thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars by doing this upfront work,” Coppington said.
The framework is modeled into a three tier architecture called the page class architecture, which makes it easier for non programmers, like QA analysts to use. The framework approach gives teams the opportunity to share test scripts across products and encourage efficiency in the testing process. The QA ops team follows a DevSecOps model, that had the VA shift testing to the development stage. Each product line is developed differently, depending on their testing requirements. They started out testing newly introduced code quarterly, finding large numbers of errors, and eventually worked down to testing after each sprint cycle, resulting in the saving of time and money.
“While the developer is starting to code, the QA analyst is starting to write the test scripts… As code is starting to be pushed out of the QA environment, they’re starting to execute their automated tests, they’re starting to think about the automation effort,” Coppinger said on ‘The Federal Drive with Tom Temin.’
Even though the infrastructure of applications isn’t exclusively VA’s, they have their own private clouds that hosts the framework. Working closely with their security team they are capable of automated testing in different cloud environments. This has led to the use of AI and machine learning in the testing process.
“One thing that we’ve been using recently is AI…and what it does is if there’s a change; if a developer makes a change, or a customer makes a change to a website and pushes it out and your script fails, what AI does is it finds the change, logs it, and will continue running. Your scripts will continue to run and log it, so you can see where the the change is,” Coppinger said. “We’re prototyping it. We have one product line using it. It looks very promising, because the biggest complaint among project managers is the maintenance factor right in test automation scripts.
For Coppinger, the work at VA is both exciting and personal, and staying up to date on technology is important, because it’s helping veterans.
“I’m a disable veteran. I flew for the Army for a number of years, and I have a disability, so it’s really important that our products are quality, that they perform like they’re supposed to. I have skin in the game.” Coppinger said.
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