Tools

Traditionally, automated scripts are derived from existing test cases. But if we divorce the notion of “automation” from the notions of “test cases” and “test scripts,” we can think of automation as a judicious use of technology to help humans do their jobs. This broadens our world to include different tools that can help testers increase coverage, test faster, and detect trends.

Jurgen Appelo’s useful and fun-to-read book Managing for Happiness: Games, Tools, and Practices to Motivate Any Team gives you concrete tools to identify ways to help your team be happier and to create environments where people can thrive and be more productive. Despite the word managing being in the title, the book is a beneficial read for anyone.

Though automation is often mentioned in the same breath as behavior-driven development, they are not equally important. If you want to use behavior-driven development, do just that: Work on getting the approach right, and forget about the automation at first. Here's why you should think of automation as more of a bonus to the BDD process.

Flaky tests pass or fail unexpectedly for reasons that appear random. It can be easy to use flaky tests to discredit automated end-to-end testing, but they also can tell you things—about both the application and your team dynamic. Josh Grant gives some technical and human examples of times flaky tests helped his testing efforts.