Using Scripting to Explore

I have often talked about the perils of test automation. I think it is a seductive thing and we fall into those seductive arms far to easily, only to get hurt in the end. There is also a lot of talk about whether testers should be able to code or not. I think you should give it serious consideration, but so often the “testers being able to code” conversation centers on test automation. Here’s the problem. Writing good test automation especially at the UI level is one of the hardest types of coding to do well. I’ve been learning Selenium lately as I’m looking at automation some things for my team.  Getting that first test to work wasn’t that hard. Until.

Until I went in and tried to remove all those manual sleeps I had in there and until I tried to clean it up so that it wouldn’t fail later and until I started to think about how to make it work cross-browser.  There is so much to more to writing good automation than just getting some selenium commands to work. After working on it for a while, I realized that it probably isn’t worth it for this project. It is pretty small and we can get through the regression tests pretty quickly by hand.  However, that doesn’t mean there is no place for automation.  Why does our automation have to be fully and completely hands off? There are some regression tests that we do that could be done much more quickly with the help of some automation.  There are also some areas we know we have niggly bugs that we should be able to pin down with the help of some automation.

You see, I think one of the best places for testers to use automation is for helping with exploration. There are so many questions that take a long time or aren’t possible to get the answer too without the help of some scripting. I think we do ourselves a disservice as testers when we only think of our scripting skills as applying to regression test automation. In light of that, I think it is time for more testers to think about how to leverage programming skills to get better at exploring.

I’ve been working on a course called scripting for testers that will help demonstrate the value of this and show some examples of what this could look like. As I have material that makes sense to share I will put it up here as part of a series I will call exploring with code. Keep an eye out for it. I hope it will be helpful!