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- Who has helped us in
our automation efforts?

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We want to share a couple of our stories.

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But one of the questions
that always comes up is

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do testers need to code?

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Should testers be doing this automation?

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Janet what do you think?

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- Well, you mentioned the term before

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generalized specialists,

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and I think that testers
need to understand code,

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should be able to read and
understand some of the things,

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but to actually code production code

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I'm not sure that they need to.

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It's a help to be able to code

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but I don't think they have to.

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One of my teams, we were choosing

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a tool to go through the
user interface to test,

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and our lead developer was...

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we were having a little
bit of trouble with it,

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and so our lead developer
said, "Janet, I can help you."

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And I go, "OK."

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He said, so...

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He did downloaded Ruby, downloaded Water,

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did a proof of concept,
took about a half a day

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to show us that we could actually do that.

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And then, he would write the initial test

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so that the rest of the testers

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could use it as examples to continue on.

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He took it into...

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as part of his job, to help us.

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So every time we needed a new library

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or a new functionality underneath,

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the programmers actually
helped us write that,

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so we didn't have to.

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Now the interesting thing was,

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that over time, one of our testers

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really liked this idea.

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So he actually started
understanding more about it.

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He took an interest.

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He actually took over a lot of the coding,

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but because he wanted to,
not because he had to.

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So what about you Lisa?

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Do you have a story to share?

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- Yeah, I found that the developers

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are usually quite willing to help,

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as long as they're...

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we're not in a dysfunctional environment

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where we're all driven to
meet that deadline, right?

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So when they have time.

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Now, on my last team, it took them

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a long time to learn how to
do tester and development.

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That's really got quite
a steep learning curve,

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and then once you learn it,

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none of those developers
would ever go back.

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- Yes.

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- But, it took them a while to learn.

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And, we had talked about
testing at the API level,

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and using that for acceptance
tester and development,

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and I thought that was so important.

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I really wanted to get going on it.

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And, we had chosen a tool
to use called FitNesse,

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and I had to be patient and just wait

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until the team was far enough along

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in writing their unit test with TDD,

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and then when I felt like

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they were not too stressed
about that anymore,

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I went to a developer, who seemed

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the friendliest on the team, and said,

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"hey, we've all agreed
to use this FitNesse tool

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to test at the API level,

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you're working on a story
that seems ideal for this.

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Would you pair with me for awhile,

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and let's see if we can write
some tests for this story?"

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And so, we spent a couple of hours.

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He found that it was very easy to write

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the fixture codes to send the
inputs to the production code,

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and get the outputs back, and

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the tool does the
comparison of the results.

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And, he thought it was quite useful.

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So the next day at the stand up,

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he related this experience and said,

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"hey, we wrote some FitNesse tests.

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It was really pretty easy."

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So then I picked another
developer on the team,

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and we went through the same thing,

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and had these ah-hah moments of

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oh I thought the story
should work this way.

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- Yes.

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- Oh no, I thought it
should work this way.

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And so, it really helped
our collaboration,

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and because they found
value in it right away,

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they were more than glad to help,

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and like you said, it doesn't necessarily

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mean a big investment of time.

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- Yeah, and I think that's
a really good strategy.

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Choosing somebody you have a relationship

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already with, right.

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So if I'm trying to introduce something

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going to the friendliest developer

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or the one I have the relationship.

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I've also said the other way.

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Programmers, if you're
trying to do something,

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find the friendliest tester
- Right.

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- who is most willing to try something.

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Once you show that it works,

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then you can move on.

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I've been known to have chocolates

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on my desk as bribery.

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It works pretty good too.

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- That is a good idea.

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- But, really help, really
find who can help you.

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- Right.

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And again, as I said,
this can be an investment

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of time at the beginning,

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so do educate the managers on

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what this investment means to them.

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How is it going to save us

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time and money over the long term?

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So, we need to make a
little investment now.

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- Be able to articulate what that means.

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- Right.
- Yes.

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- Next, let's look at some ways

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to create an automation strategy

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using the test automation pyramid.