More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team

Part VI: Test Automation

Test automation is necessary. We need to automate to manage technical debt, make time for critical testing activities such as exploratory testing, and guide development with customer-facing examples. Automated regression tests tell us quickly if we’ve broken existing production code. As well, our automated tests provide excellent living documentation for our application.

Test automation is hard. Some types of automation are fairly painless and can even be rewarding once you get past the “hump of pain” of learning how. Some present ongoing challenges, such as testing Java-Script and logic-heavy user interface pages and experiencing sporadic failures due to timing or automatic browser upgrades.

Agile Testing included a ...