Title Text
Automation Sync-Up
August 29, 2017
Paul Merrill
Decrease your scope
Fail for one,
and only one,
reason
Identify responsibility
Avoid unnecessary dependencies
Ask, “What is the simplest thing that could possibly work?”
Maaret Pyhäjärvi
I feel we do a lot of test automation, yet it provides less actionable value than I'd like
It finds crashes where human patience of sticking around long enough will not do the job, and makes random crashes into systematic patterns with saving results of various runs
We have not built stuff that would be crashing in new ways (or we don't test in ways that uncover those crashes)
It keeps checking all operating systems where people don't do that
We run tests on all operating systems, but if they fail, the reasons are not operating system specific. And there's much simpler tests than what we run to figure out that the backend system is again down for whatever reason.
It notices side effects on basic functionality in an organization where loads of teams commit their changes on the same system without always understanding dependencies
If our tests fail, we end up pinging other teams on fixes and I'm growing a strong dislike on the idea of not giving these tests for the teams themselves to run that need pinging.
I cannot remember more than one instance where the tests that should protect my team have found something that was feedback to my team