A Beginner’s Guide to Test Automation

Automation! It may be a buzzword these days, but it’s also a useful approach to include in your testing and quality toolkit. If you’re new to automated testing, you’re probably starting off with a lot of questions: Which tool or framework should you use? How do you know which tests to automate? Why is automated testing useful for you and your team? The options for automated testing are wide open, and you may feel overwhelmed when you’re first getting started.

I want to help turn some of your unknown unknowns into known unknowns! The goal of automation is to create anti-fragile tests that are easy to understand, maintain, and hand off. I’ll help you get closer to that goal by answering some of the questions that I had to tackle when I first started with automated testing, and also give you some other questions to think about for your own needs:

• What’s important to consider – and what isn’t – when you’re choosing a tool or framework.
• How to decide which tests to automate, and why.
• Best practices for actually writing the tests, like separation of concerns and useful failure messages.

Your own needs may differ, but being able to set a solid foundation for automated testing is useful for everyone. I hope you’ll come away from this talk feeling confident that you know how to get started with automated testing, and better prepared when your challenges do come along!

Session Takeaways:

• Understanding that the goal isn’t “automate everything”, but to automate the tests that make sense for your needs.
• Learning how to create a good test structure, such as granularity, independent tests, relevant failure messages.
• Comparisons and considerations for choosing a tool or framework.