Some Innovation

Some years back, when I was leading a team of testers, there was this talk of adding even more value to the client by providing even better solutions in lesser duration leveraging the vast collective knowledge on the domain and innovative solutions which will result in increased productivity and a faster delivery of an outstanding solution. So I thought that I will also do my bit. It was not all that self-less also. I needed to have something to put as my contribution to the team, outside my stated scope of work. So, with this in mind, I thought about automation. Most of our projects included a functional testing of the solution which is developed by the team. Since we have no automated testing tools with us for the green-screen environment, the testing folks spend a considerable amount of time to manually navigate across screens, input the data values, take the screen shots, navigate to the next screen, input the values, and compare values across screens and repeating the same stuff over and over again as per the script. I realized that input of data and capture of screens were totally non-value adding activities and they were the ones which took considerable amount of time while executing tests. With some research on the web I figured out that this can be automated. I discovered the PSL (Powerterm Scripting Language) which can run on the Powerterm emulator and do most of whatever I wished to automate as per the commands. After 2 days of digging into it, I developed about 5 generic scripts to take input values for different functionality of our application, take screen shots in word documents as per the navigation rules specified and so on.

Jubilant on my discovery, I sent a mail to everyone in the team about this new way of doing things which could save innumerable dog hours of effort. Some people also stopped by my desk to figure out what I was talking about. Some of them were impressed. I thought that this thing was so good, that if everyone in the team took upon themselves to develop at least one such automated script, we can reduce our long hours drastically. But nothing of that sort happened.

No one was interested to learn it. As time went by, some of the team members approached me to automate certain of their activities. There was a request to post about 500 transactions. Someone wanted to change the names of about 100 account holders. Someone wanted to take about 600 pages of screen shots and they would come to me and ask if that could be done. I would belt out a script in an hour and then their job would be completed in matter of minutes. For example, the 600 page screen shot job took just about 44 minutes to complete, whereas it would have taken days if the person would have manually taken the screen shots. However, with all these benefits, still no one wanted to learn how to prepare these scripts! I am still thinking why it turned out this way. May be people were averse to change! But one thing I learnt is the need to publicize whatever one does so that people around you take cognizance.