When the responsibility of automating tests is passed over a wall onto a separate team, we lose accountability, become less efficient, duplicate efforts, delay and complicate maintenance, and sadly, often get discouraged.

In this talk, I will be walking through some narratives that are common on projects and that have a negative impact on test automation. Each scenario will be presented as a myth to be busted, along with specific recommendations for addressing it. In the end, I will give some recommendations, a mix of:
– tips for getting the team involved and engaged in quality efforts (with a focus on automation),
– general automation guidelines.

Myths to be busted:
– Our schedule is aggressive, we don’t have time for automation (or the core team doesn’t have time for automation)
– I am a developer, it is not my responsibility to write tests
– I am a test automation engineer. Everyone stay away from my code!
– Regression testing is the responsibility of another team (the regression team)
– Tests are flaky. There is too much overhead in writing and maintaining automated tests.
– I am going to lose my job to robots