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I've Built Test Automation for 20 Years, Ask Me Anything!

Burdette Lamar on October 17, 2018

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David J Eddy

What has been the most difficult concept to get developer and business buy in based on return value to the organization?

How do you get those who dot not believe testing will actually help to believe it does indeed make there effort more effective?

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Burdette Lamar

I have not had a problem with that. Usually I've been hired specifically to build test automation, so they're already convinced.

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David J Eddy

Lucky :).

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Vamsi • Edited

Hey thanks for the AMA. What do you think about having TDD(unit tests) Vs testing after writing code(manual and E2E automation). Do you think it's more cost effective to have TDD rather than testing after writing code?

On a broader level how do you think the testing is evolved from when you started working? And what practice would you recommend?

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Burdette Lamar

Unit testing is essential, whether TDD or a little more tardy. For my GitHub projects and their gems, I almost always do TDD (but sometimes I'm a little tardy).

Most agree that some manual testing is also essential, especially exploratory testing.

I'm not a fan of E2E, but instead prefer crafty testing of the segments along the E2E path. E2E is expensive to build, often runs slowly, and can make errors difficult to isolate.

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Daniel Villa

What is your opinion on AI on automated tests? For example tools like MABL

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Burdette Lamar

No experience there. Here's James Bach on the subject.

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Vico

Hello thanks for #AMA, how to create test automation if we have very short deadline?

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Burdette Lamar • Edited

For me, test automation is the grinding work of developing professional-grade software whose purpose is testing. This does not lend itself to deadlines. (Which does not mean that your boss won't set deadlines anyway.)

In building testing for a REST API, for example, I create an class for each endpoint, and a class for each resource. This is not testing -- it's what will permit testing.

The ROI in the beginning is very small, but can increase quickly. It will do so only if the framework is robust and resilient; if not, the test project will be crushed by the costs of maintenance.

So a very short deadline for test automation is self-contradictory (IMO).

But it can attract those who sell test tools that (they say) are easy and wonderful right from the first day. :)

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Random Dev

Hi, thanks for offering your knowledge to the community. Do you have any suggestion regarding testing WordPress's themes and plugins?

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Burdette Lamar

Sorry to say that I have no experience along those lines. My automated testing has been desktop and web apps, and REST and SOAP APIs.