Journey from Rookie Tester to Senior Test Automation Expert

Winner of most popular track at the 2018 EuroSTAR Conference as voted by the delegates.

Testing used to be a phase in software processes, now it’s a continuous task. Jani started his career as a manual tester over a decade ago and have then evolved to the test automation expert. In the future it’s not enough to be a MacGyver, capable of solving one’s way out of the situation with improvisation, few good tools and knowledge. Instead of that one needs more of Horatio Cane and the CSI team to methodically investigate whole crime scene and gather evidence about everything. This is because the focus or “crime scene” won’t be about the System Under Test (SUT) alone anymore, it will be about the SUT, test automation, test cases, infrastructure, vendors and much more.

In Jani’s journey from the rookie tester learning the MacGyver tricks to the automation expert methodically investigating the crime scene, Jani has had to invent three new concepts to overcome the challenges that he faced in this transformation:-

1. “Critical-red”: a concept of automatically picking the failing test cases from the executions and automatically executing them first to ensure fast feedback and save valuable test setup capacity.-
2. “Jailing-tests”: a concept of automatically sorting automated test cases according to their behaviour. It helps team to focus on important things while keeping constant confidence for the sw quality. Main reasons for failures are; environment problem, test problem, specification change, sw bug, and flaky test. All these reasons need completely different approaches to solve them.-
3. “Test-History”: a concept of gathering the information from not only the failing tests but the actual execution history data. With this concept we start to understand the trends in test executions and gain ability to predict and see into the future.