What do I mean by Context Driven Automation?

I count myself a member of the Context-Driven school of testing. Context-Driven testers believe that the choice of testing practices should be driven by the context in which they are used. The practices that are appropriate for testing the control software for a CT scanner are not the same as the practices that are appropriate for testing a web-based email client.

I believe that the same is true for automation. The context in which the automation is being used should inform the design decisions about the tool.

In my experience, there are a few questions you should ask yourself to determine what your context is:

• Who is going to write and maintain the tests?
• Who is going to look at the test results and what information do they need to see?
• What decisions are going to be made based on the results from the automation?

In future posts, I'll address these questions, and other issues, in more detail.