Writing and running test scripts is at the same time easy and hard. It is also easy to get it wrong and hard to get it right without some experience and knowledge. Small things matter.
Developer, Tester, QA Manager, Engineering Manager, Test Manager
To get started with writing test automation for your web application and/or mobile application is rather easy. It can be done locally with tools publicly available and free of charge. Making mistakes, having slow test scripts, or flaky tests is acceptable in this early stages and when working privately. Doing it right is the hard thing.
Everything changes though when we do this in a corporate environment. Budget is tight, time is limited and the next shitstorm because of lacking quality or bad UX is only a tweet away. In this kind of environment slow running and unreliable tests are not helpful. Small things can over time creep into your test suite and cause longer test execution. Longer execution time means higher cost, taking longer to get a result and as a consequence it takes longer to make a business decision. Furthermore this is exasperated if the tests are unreliable. The confidence in your product dwindles.
Making small adjustments and use of best practices in your test scripts can have a significant impact in making your tests more performant, reliable and bring you true value. Testing for the sake of testing is not valuable if it does not drive business decisions.
This talk is going to explore and show the impact of unoptimized tests and how to solve them.