Automating workflows

So you are stuck with submitting lots of data over and over again through a long web-based forms … sigh!! Wondering whether this can be automated.

OR

You have entered into this community based competition where people register and vote on different entries (you see a lot of these competition these days … crowdsourcing the judgement to the community … another brilliant way out of making judgements!!), how do you win when your entry is hopelessly late and others are way ahead??

Well you see, all of these are workflows, and especially on a web environment they can be automated. The IT industry already does this, through regression testing. When they have to test and re-test the same thing over and over, they finally realized that an automated testing tool needs to be built which can do this task. Plus, we want to do this for free, right … enter open source.

I was tinkering with the open source regression testing tool, called Sahi and I realized the beauty of this application. Consider these scenarios –

• A friend has participated in a competition. It is a crowdsourced competition where users register and vote for their favorite entries. Hmmm … all you need is a set of valid email-ids and voila!! From 500 votes to 2500 votes in no time!!
• You are part of a web development team and in charge of testing all the minute details. The changes in the scope are coming left, right and center … you have to keep on testing the application repeatedly. Well, now its a one time thing!! Create different scripts for each functionality, and voila!!

Basically, if you are creative enough, and wherever there is a need to do something repeatedly, you can use this tool. Also, be on the lookout for captchas, I dont think it works with them.