In sprint automation, build the culture.

In the last 3 years my company and team have pushed an "automate as much as we can" mentality.

This has proven to be challenging other testers and myself, having to not just test but also automate as many test cases as possible. To add to the pressure, we run 2-week sprints with an endless backlog which leaves no time to catch up on automation at a later stage.

So, I approached the problem like most, a lot of late nights and a frustrated team. Automated tests were in now the definition of done and testing was labelled the bottle neck. Sound familiar?

This model was unsustainable and to make things worse the quality of our product wasn’t getting any better, it got worse since us testers were focused on getting our coding skills up to scratch which left no time to put in any effort into the critical thinking.

Things had to change fast, and we were tired of testing being blamed for not making commitments.

I'll share the challenges faced in trying to be an effective agile team member and automating as much as possible up front.

The journey of changing the culture of my agile team from one were the QA is responsible for quality, to one where the QA drives the quality. The things we have tried in our sprints with regards to create visibility on tasks, how building a testing framework that allows for easy coding and debugging as well as tips on getting Devs involved and treating the code and tests as one.