Deconfuse E2E Test Automation for IT Executives

Don’t get fooled by your internal technical advisors.

Image credit: https://pixabay.com/vectors/businessman-confused-street-sign-6138818/

Let’s start with a short video of Steve Jobs, the best IT Executive ever.

“as where the enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. (audience laughed and clapped)” — Steve Jobs

Being confused about E2E test automation and Continuous Testing is OK, but it does not have to make wrong decisions. In fact, if following common sense, making the right calls is almost a certainty. This article explains, for IT executives and senior IT managers.

1. Your Technical Advisors are confused too.

The Fact: To my knowledge, there is no university offering a proper E2E Testing course, yet it is a key activity in modern software development.

Therefore, your technical advisors (in various titles, such as Chief/principal software engineers, Technical architects, Technical Managers, ….), don’t really know E2E Test Automation. In fact, they never witnessed a single successful implementation.

The audience of this article is IT executives. I will use simple terms that you would understand or use examples. What a successful E2E Test Automation means at Facebook:

“Facebook is released twice a day, and keeping up this pace is at the heart of our culture. With this release pace, automated testing with Selenium is crucial to making sure everything works before being released.” — DAMIEN SERENI, Engineering Director at Facebook, at Selenium 2013 conference.

And Linkedin:

from Wired Article, “The Software Revolution Behind LinkedIn’s Gushing Profits”

Don't be amazed by the above. It shall have been the case for every Agile project. Here is a showcase of mine, a Micro-ISV.

In other words, if your company don’t achieve “weekly or fortnightly production deployment”, enabled by automated End-to-End (via UI) regression testing, the so-called “Agile”, “Scrum” or “DevOps” is completely fake.

In case you wonder, that’s impossible, maybe only the world’s top tech giants can achieve that. Wrong! I have implemented successful E2E Test Automation and achieved “Daily Production Releases” capability for some clients and all my apps. Here is a showcase.

In fact, if you follow the common sense advice in this article, you will be able to achieve that in weeks' time, too.

2. Your Technical Advisors don’t want to admit that they knew nothing about E2E Test Automation.

Those technical advisors, in theory, understand the importance of E2E Test automation.

However, most of these senior technical advisors know their limits (in E2E test automation and Agile) but are unwilling to admit that. (For obvious reasons, in particular, they thought testing was easy. Very Wrong! The fact, if it was easy, all your teams would be doing automated UI regression testing already.)

“Testing is harder than developing. If you want to have good testing you need to put your best people in testing.”
- Gerald Weinberg, in a podcast (2018)

“Automated testing through the GUI is intuitive, seductive, and almost always wrong!” — Robert Martin, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, “Ruining your Test Automation Strategy”

“In my experience, great developers do not always make great testers, but great testers (who also have strong design skills) can make great developers. It’s a mindset and a passion. … They are gold”.
- Google VP Patrick Copeland, in an interview (2010)

All the troubles start when a confused IT executive seeks those internal “technical advisors” for E2E test automation advice.

To be fair, it is largely an IT executive’s fault, not those ‘technical advisors’. You asked the wrong person who lacks the knowledge, without giving clearly criteria.

3. Use your common sense to avoid bad advice