More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)) by Janet Gregory & Lisa Crispin

Author:Janet Gregory & Lisa Crispin [Gregory, Janet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pearson Education
Published: 2014-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

When testers own test automation, they must spend large portions of time writing test scripts for stories in the current iteration, investigating test failures, and maintaining the existing automated tests so they continue to work as the production code is updated. There’s often little time left for crucial activities such as exploratory testing. Programmers who aren’t automating functional tests have no incentive to create testable code because they don’t feel the pain of code that’s not automation friendly.

When the whole team is involved in test automation, the programmers recognize how they can make their code testable. For example, they can design the code with different layers, each of which can be tested independently. For a web-based application, simply using unique identifiers for HTML elements rather than using dynamic naming makes automating UI tests easier.

It is important for the whole team to own, and see the value of, automation, so that the work can be shared where it makes the most sense. It makes sense for the people who are best at writing code to write the test code. We do know people who self-identify as testers who are also excellent coders and do a great job of designing automated tests. However, on most teams, the people with the most coding experience are the programmers, and their skills can be used for the test code. Creating tests and writing the code to make them run are two different skill sets.

Testers are good at knowing which tests to specify and which tests to change if existing functionality is being changed. Collaborating with each other to implement test automation makes sense (see the section later in this chapter on “Testing through the UI”). As we said in Agile Testing (pp. 300–01), team members in other roles, such as system administrators and database administrators, also contribute to good automation solutions.

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