Audience
Testers, Developers, Team leads, Managers, Product Managers
Key-Learnings
- Take a deep breath before jumping into automation and learn how a system can be designed to facilitate testing before you write a single test.
- Understand how testability can make - or break - automation success. React applications, element locator strategies, and application design are import
- Learn how to garner the support you need before you even start from product, managers, devs, and other testers.
- Gain confidence that once you do start automating, you’re spending time focusing on the important thing - testing!
Stop wasting time working around testability issues when you should be testing!
Having blundered my way through one automation role where I struggled with the tool I used, had difficulty garnering support from the larger team, and dealt with an application that was automation un-friendly, I thought I would be way more prepared for the next role. There’s no way I could suffer from the same mistakes twice, right? Well, several months into a new job, using a new tool, with a new team, testing against an application that just didn’t want to be automated, I found myself scratching my head. How did I end up here again?
It seems I fell into a trap that is not uncommon. There are so many resources available online on how to get started automating but very little on considerations to make before you even start. As I found, it’s easy to build out a framework and start writing your first tests – even with no coding knowledge. What is far harder is building an automation suite that can stand the test of time.
Over the course of my automation journeys between two different roles at two different companies I was frustrated and dismayed to find some of the same challenges crop up. After all, I had learned so much through my struggles the first time! It turns out I had made the same critical error both times – jumping in to write tests against an application that had not been designed to be testable in the first place. Even more difficult, I was surrounded by development teams that didn’t seem to understand the importance that testability has towards the success of UI automation.
In this talk, I will share my journey, my struggles, and what I have learned along the way. By encouraging those that are considering making the move towards automation to take a step back and team buy-in and testability before beginning, they can avoid some common struggles and set themselves up for automation success before writing a single line of code!