More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team

Chapter 14. Technical Debt in Testing

Ward Cunningham coined the term technical debt (Cunningham, 2009) to represent rushing delivery of a feature or user story without ever going back to refactor the code to express your learnings. We can incur crippling technical debt in our automated test code as well as our production code. Teams often make mistakes in their initial attempts at functional test automation partly because today’s frameworks and drivers make it easy to automate tests quickly. However, if we don’t pay as much attention to code design principles and patterns with automated test code as we do (ideally) with production code, maintaining ...