Since I’ve published the business case ideas on the blog, I’ve been getting some nice internal (from Velocity Partners colleagues) comments around it. I thought I’d share one of those with you here because they drive some real world clarification into the idea.
The following comment is from Matias Bauer. Here’s is his personal introduction:
I am a 27-year-old software engineer who has been gathering experience by working mostly as a developer but, for the last year and a half, I have been evolving into an SDET. I like to use the word “evolving” because I think that from this past experience I was able to work both as a manual and automation QA, which gave me a broad vision and an overall experience that I will try to share with you in these comments.
He has a lot of in-the-trenches experience and is adding context to many of my ideas. I like that.
Comment
Help us help you
As a SDET I think that, if given the chance, one of our main goals to accomplish is to make our clients understand the real value of automation testing. As you said, the ROI is not time, speed or savings based, although automation seeks to lower the costs by creating stability and reducing the time – or keeping it to a minimum – as the project grows bigger while improving the quality of our product by early detecting bugs and preventing the user from a bad experience.
Having the whole team working as one creates a synergy that may be the result of a great product and a remarkable team-working experience. By designing a good automation framework we can remove from the table one of the main concerns about the brittleness of the UI. It is true that UI changes over time; causing the scripts to fail, but with a good design those changes should be managed quickly without any extra effort.
The hard part is to get our customers to trust that a thoughtful automated framework & strategy is the best way to go, despite of the time and effort it may take at first. And let’s not forget about continuous integration. This is one of the major assets we can get our hands on. Keeping our testing time to a minimum while running regression tests or different suites as the application and number of tests grow bigger is the best way to ensure the quality, to scale easily and to keep an eye on everything having real-time statistics on each piece of our product.
To summarize in one phrase, I would like to say to our potential clients the following:
“Embrace the idea of automation testing. Trust your team and they will respond with distinguished quality for your product or service.”
What a wonderful comment. If you’ve been following my writing at all, you know that I’m rarely at a loss for words. Let me change that here. Matias has literally “said it all” 😉
Stay agile my friends,
Bob.