E2E Test Automation Anti-Pattern: Prioritizing Tests in Execution

Automated E2E tests that are rarely run quickly become outdated—you might as well delete them if you don’t run them often.

This is one of 59 anti-patterns included in my new book: “End-to-end Test Automation Anti-Patterns: Lessons from Real-World Test Automation Failures”. Annual subscribers to the AgileWay newsletter (just $50/year for accessing my 300+ behind-paywall articles) will receive their choice of 14 of my ebooks (including this one) each year.

At STARWEST 2013, the world’s leading software testing conference, during the Q&A session after my talk, the very first question from the audience was:
“What’s your view on test prioritization in test automation?”

I guess that he saw the below screenshot included in my slide: daily execution of the full E2E test suite (~300 user-story-level Watir tests), which enabled daily production release in a government project I led (2008-2010).