Everyone loves “big bang” rollouts coming from specialized teams, right? No? We’re enlightened now; we have the Agile and DevOps stuffs! But why do we see so many UI test automation efforts fall victim to traditional waterfall approaches, then? Isn’t there a better way? This session will talk about changing and improving one of the last bastions of “big bang” rollouts, highly specialized and isolated teams, and the “throw it over the wall” mentality: the way most companies approach automated UI testing when building a delivery pipeline. This session is targeted at people just starting test automation efforts, people in the middle of these efforts, and grizzled veterans of failed test automation projects. The session will be valuable for testing specialists, DevOps engineers, coders, and anyone on a cross-functional agile team. Building and maintaining test automation is a daunting task for many organizations. Companies with legacy applications often have a significant amount of technical debt around quality and testing, but even startups struggle once they scale beyond a few coders. In addition, functional/UI testing with automated tools is a specialized, high-demand skill, which often leads companies to “big bang” delivery from highly-specialized teams. This is quite ironic when the test automation effort is for an application that’s part of the organization adopting Agile / DevOps mindsets and practices! The promise of Agile frameworks – and now DevOps – has always included cross-functional teams, incremental rollout, and a focus on highest-value deliverables first. We’ll talk about how we can leverage these ideas and practices within test automation efforts. We’ll cover challenges and solutions with people, practices, and tools. Attendees will take away concrete actions to: • Foster teams that understand quality and test automation are a shared responsibility – not just “the tester’s problem” • Address objections to using high-dollar skills inside of generalized, cross-functional teams • Identify the highest-value parts of a massive test suite • Add – and more importantly, maintain – automated tests in an incremental way • Inspect and adapt test automation approaches and processes

August 23 @ 11:30
11:30 — 12:15 (45′)

Gary Pedretti