Track Talk

Journey towards Automation: Pitfalls and Possibilities

Sune Engsig

14:15-14:45 CEST Wednesday 29th September

The journey towards automation: Pitfalls and possibilities for teams and testers. We talk to them every day: Organisations and businesses on the verge of committing to automation. Behind them are countless hours, considerations, and discussions leading up to the decision to automate. Coincidentally, it’s not just one single decision – but several. The problem is, most decision-makers aren’t aware of this. Very often, the focus is on the tool rather than the method. As a consequence, automation gets off to a rough start.

In my role as Chief Evangelist, I have seen many of these situations, talking to leading IT organisations all over the world. I want to share our lessons learned from these experiences with our target users – the skilled, functional testers. As I see it, automation has to be based on an understanding of the business processes; an insight deeply founded in any experienced tester.

In this presentation, I will touch on some of the missed, but critical, considerations when embarking upon automation. Some are relevant for the test managers – some for the testers. All of them are crucial for a successful automation journey. And I promise: Not one single word about any automation tool.

The most important topics are:

-          The value and contribution of a tester: Beyond executing the test script.
-          What are the key enablers for long-term sustainable automation? (Hint: It’s not the tool)
-          Automation: NOT business as usual (Hint: Not because of the tool)
-          Where does the automation effort begin (Hint: Not with the tool)

The purpose of this presentation is to empower, engage and educate the functional tester towards the automation journey. Because automation is mistakenly perceived as an agenda specifically for the engineers. Hint: It is not.