The Department of Veterans Affairs, which serves a population of more than 15 million veterans, takes a flexible approach to automated software testing. The agency manages a large number of applications at multiple stages of their lifecycle, from advanced to legacy, some of which contain 800 web pages. The VA relies on a quality assurance team to manage the testing of these applications, using a proprietary tool that has been improved over the past decade.
The Quality Assurance Operations team, also known as QA ops, uses what they describe as very basic tools for automated testing, including plugins in their browsers, recording automated test scripts, while other more complex, commercial off-the-shelf products are.
Todd Coppinger, an IT supervisor in the Office of Information and Technology software testing, and manager of the Quality Assurance Operations team, said his team’s goal is to try to standardize the automation testing process across product lines.
“We have approximately 600 applications in the VA and each product line uses its own different automated tools to meet their needs. It’s not one tool that fits everyone’s needs, because we have older legacy systems, new systems and mobile devices. . . We use a homegrown tool that offers a wide range of modules, adapting to a wide range of testing requirements and platforms,” said Coppinger. Federal Monthly Insights – Automated Software Testing.
The QA ops team calls their tool the automation tool interface. It is a set of open source libraries. The framework can be maintained locally, including on a mobile device up to the enterprise level. The team can perform testing on a wide range of applications, including legacy terminal emulators, mobile devices, APIs and web-based products.
Coppington spent much 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 with the use of open source technology that he has managed to bundle into the framework. One benefit of the QA Ops team’s use of the open source libraries is financial.
“There is a common code set shared by the more than 55 product lines currently used in the framework. . . This common code saves product lines six months of pre-writing automation scripts. It covers all the complexities of finding components on an application page. We save thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars by doing this work up front,” Coppington said.
The framework is modeled in a three-level architecture called page class architecture, making it easier to use for non-programmers, such as QA analysts. The framework approach gives teams the ability to share test scripts between products and drive efficiency in the testing process. The QA ops team follows a DevSecOps model, where VA testing has moved into the development phase. Each product line is developed differently depending on testing requirements. They started by testing newly introduced code every quarter, finding a large number of bugs, and eventually moved to testing after every sprint cycle, saving time and money.
“As the developer starts coding, the QA analyst starts writing the test scripts… As the code starts to be pushed out of the QA environment, they start running their automated tests, they start thinking about the automation efforts ,” Coppinger continued ‘The Federal Drive with Tom Temin.’
Even though the application infrastructure is not made up exclusively of VAs, they have their own private clouds hosting the framework. By working closely with their security team, they are able to perform automated testing in various cloud environments. This has led to the use of AI and machine learning in the testing process.
“One thing we’ve been using lately is AI…and what it does is when a change happens; If a developer makes a change, or a customer makes a change to a website and pushes it out and your script fails, AI finds the change, records it, and stays active. Your scripts continue to run and log it, so you can see where the change is,” says Coppinger. “We are making a prototype of it. We have one product line that uses it. It looks promising because the biggest complaint among project managers is the maintenance factor in test automation scripts.
For Coppinger, working at VA is both exciting and personal, and staying on top of technology is important because it helps veterans.
“I am a veteran with a disability. I flew for the military for several years and I have a disability. So it is very important that our products are of good quality, that they perform as they should. I have skin in the game.” said Copper.
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