- Let's look at the benefits of automation
and what can get in the way of successful automation.
We want to know what worked yesterday still works today.
Automation tells us that.
It's our regression tests,
but it's a change-detector.
It won't find new bugs,
but it does let us make changes fearlessly,
because we have that safety net.
When we talk about automation helping testers
be able to do new testing,
we mean using their critical thinking skills
to ask questions about new features and stories,
exploratory testing to build confidence,
and we'll talk more about that in lesson five.
But, being able to test those quality attributes,
being able to test the non-functionals,
we want to be able to have time to do that
and automation allows us.
Coders and testers collaborate to automate.
It promotes that shared understanding of the features
that we're building.
We also want to reduce cycle time with automation.
That's one of the biggest benefits.
That short feedback loop helps us stay on track,
collaborating to specify executable tests,
which will help us guide our coding.
That means fewer defects.
Scripts, frameworks for test data setup,
automated deployments to test environments.
We get to know exactly what we're testing.
Infrastructure, spinning up test environments
for specific stories and branching.
David Evans coined the term living documentation
and Goiko adds (indecipherable)
in his book, Specification By Example.
If business doesn't get automation,
perhaps you can sell it to them as documentation.
Because that's what it is.
If our tests all pass,
if they're running green,
they document exactly what our system does.
The whole team needs to be responsible
for keeping these builds passing.
Has to be a top priority.
This is part of that whole team buying into quality.
Another term we heard from David Evans is
Respect the tests.
I like to think of them as,
The tests grow.
We need to care and feed for them.
So not only do we need to add,
we also need to update
so that they grow successfully.