Using Shared/Service Accounts to avoid Environment Issues/Failures

[dgold]

Hello,

Unfortunately for UI Automation, we live in a world of constant OS/Security/Java/Browser/Adobe/... updates and also deal with a good number of possible sticky end user configurations.  This lead us down the path of using Shared/Service accounts to run UI Test Automation (Mostly Selenium, but some AutoIT and C# .NET) to avoid constantly troubleshooting scripts that work fine for one user, but fail for another, even on the same Virtual Machine.

1) Is this a common practice or else how is this being avoided?

2) Does anyone have any wording or literature to help convince a security team of this need?

Thanks,

Dan Gold

[David]

Can't say officially, but this seems like common practice to me. At least particularly to the CI, actual test automation runs/deployment, and not for the individual test automation development runs by QA/developer to test a new test case or new test code. The latter of which may be using the user's own account and development environment. The actual deployment typically follows standard setup of machine / virtual machine / and account (access).

Not sure what wording/literature the community has put together. Probably search for some white paper or best practices guide.