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Track Talk Th12

Breaking Testing Silos, Ten Commandments for Sustainable & Shared Automation

Jani Haapala

12:30-13:15 CEST Thursday 15th June

I’ve spent two decades on creating automation to various software development needs. It has been interesting and from time to time, worrying to see that something that was seen as a savior of software development business has turned into burden or something that is kept as hidden treasure.

DevOps and agile preached us that software development should be collaborative and social activity. It should include knights from the realms of Development, Testing, Operations and even Business on a same shared round table and they should discuss and agree together on how to best deliver value to the customers. It started well in all kingdoms but have lately started to divert into worrying directions. Each of these noble knights on the round table has their own view quality and they still have a different goals and motivations. I fear automation and emerging silos are to be blamed.

Don’t get me wrong, on kingdoms where automation is treasured as common and collaborative good, knights and their tribes can achieve unbelievable results. Especially automation in a form of CI/CD unifies development, testing, and operations to something that even business is proud of. It creates common understanding and something that everybody is willing to fight for!

I have spent most of my time around testing realm, drawing from development realm, operation realm and from business realm to help testing create test automation in collaboration with all other realms. To generate common view of quality.

Within my crusade I have found out that the best approach to solve these automation issues have been a good old missionary work with solid ten commandments to help me out on dark times.

Lately the need of collaborative automation has risen since Covid-19 drove people to home offices. Trends show that hybrid work is here to stay. Test automation can be huge community driver. Everybody needs the ability to contribute into quality and be able to show it to everybody, remotely or locally.

I’ll explain the importance of collaborative test automation and show automation anti-patterns. I’ll also share my ten commandments of automation:

Thou shall automate everything

Thou shalt not keep multiple tool chains

Thou shall codify everything

Honor “ZeroClicks”/NoOp practices

Remember to design for masses and implement for few

Remember to think Lego bricks

Thou shall offer self service solutions

Thou shalt not forget security

You should create railroad code

Thou shall automate once, execute multiple