Asking for automation help

I've noticed a trend on help forums and groups. When people ask for help with their automation that often post what they tried and that it did not work.

They don't give any information about their environment, versions of the various software involved or the code they are trying to automate.

Asking for help with your automation is similar to filing a defect report.

• Specify a summary of the problem
• Give a description of the environment (OS, browser, etc.)
• Tell them what you did, what you expected to happen and what actually happened.

There is one additional piece of information you normally put in a defect report. You normally specify which build the defect appeared in. This is because the developer fixing the bug can find the appropriate code given a build number.

When asking people outside your organization for help with an automation problem, we don't have access to your source code. So a build number does not help us. What we need instead is a code snippet. If you are testing a web site, give us the relavent HTML code you are trying to automate.

Without these bits of information it would be impossible to solve the problem. At best, you will get a lot of guessing. If you are lucky, someone will make a lucky guess or say something which makes you realize what the problem really is. However, if you want a quicker response to your questions give us the information we need to reproduce the problem and solve it.