Test Process with QTP --- Overall picture of how Automation scripts building will go

ATLM (automation life cycle) ---> Decison to automate Test -> Tool Aquisition -> Automation Introduction -> Test Design ->Test Exe and Mgnt ->Test Program Review assessment.

Source: http://www.qtp10.com/2009/06/qtp-testing-process.html

Here is how you will need to plan for automation:

The QTP (QuickTest Professional) testing process consists of the following main phases:

1. Analyzing your application
The first step in planning your test is to analyze your application to determine your testing needs.

• What are your application's development environments (for example Web, Java, or .NET)? You will need load QTP add-ins for these environments to enable QTP to identify and work with the objects in your application.
• What business processes and functionality do you want to test? To answer this, think about the various activities that customers perform in your application to accomplish specific tasks.
• Consider how to divide these business processes into smaller units. You will be creating actions based on these tasks. Smaller and more modular actions make your tests easier to read and follow, and help ease maintenance in the long run.

At this stage, you can already begin creating test skeletons and adding actions to them.

2. Preparing the testing infrastructure
Based on your testing needs, you determine what resources are required and create these resources, accordingly. Resources include shared object repositories containing test objects (which are representations of the objects in your application), function libraries containing functions that enhance QTP functionality, and so on.

You also need to configure QTP settings so that QTP will perform the tasks you need, such as displaying a results report every time you run a test.

3. Building your tests and adding steps to them After the testing infrastructure is ready, you can begin building your tests. You can create one or more empty tests and add actions to them to create the testing skeletons. You associate your object repositories with the relevant actions, and associate your function libraries with the relevant tests, so that you can insert steps using keywords. You may also need to configure test preferences at this point.

4. Enhancing your test
Inserting checkpoints into your test lets you search for a specific value of a page, object, or text string, which helps you determine whether your application is functioning correctly.
Broadening the scope of your test, by replacing fixed values with parameters, lets you check how your application performs the same operations with multiple sets of data.
Adding logic and conditional or loop statements enables you to add sophisticated checks to your test.

5. Debugging, running, and analyzing your test
You debug a test to ensure that it operates smoothly and without interruption. After the test is working correctly, you run it to check the behaviour of your application. While running, QTP opens the application and performs each step in your test.
You examine the test results to pinpoint defects in your application.

6. Reporting defects
If you have Quality Center installed, you can report the defects you discover to a database. Quality Center is the HP test management solution.