Note that this post is part of a series where I am ‘live blogging’ my way through the ministry of testing’s 30 days of Agile Testing challenge.
How can I make testing jobs easier? Automate them.
I might be getting into a controversial area here, but really – automate them. I’m not saying we should (or could) automate away the role of a tester. What I’m saying is that there are many ways that we can use automation to make life easier. Automate the boring stuff so we have more time to focus on ways to add value.
I have done this for many things in the past, but there is always more to do. Right now, my ‘make testing easier’ work revolves around trying to automate some ways to get better information about our tests. We have a lot of automated regression tests and trying to understand how to best manage and maintain them is daunting task. We have been working through many of them manually to clean them up but this is obviously a time consuming process. I’m currently look at ways I can pull some data from git log and from our reporting systems to help us better understand which tests to cleanup and/or remove and also to allow us to better monitor the overall health of our tests going forward.
How do you make testing easier? Figure out ways to use tools or scripting to leverage your skills. Figure out ways to effectively solve problems. It takes some work, but it can be done!
offbeattesting 