Industrial-Strength Automation: When You Should and How You Can

You wouldn't buy a yacht to navigate your swimming pool, any more than you would paddle a canoe to Finland. The first is overkill and the second is dangerous. But we can't conclude that yachts are always overkill or canoes always dangerous; it depends on the context. The same principle applies to test automation. When a simple script is all you need, a full-scale product development effort would be overkill. On the other hand, you will encounter circumstances where inadequate planning or engineering discipline would drown you in a sea of noisy reports from tests that nobody is smart enough to understand, let alone maintain. Drawing on experiences from more than twenty years in the trenches, Mike Duskis will address two questions about industrial-strength test automation: when do you need it, and how can you go about building it when the time comes? As he digs into the second question, he will share specific, realistic strategies for staffing the effort, developing the code base, and integrating the executable tests into a modern DevOps delivery pipeline. He'll also point you to an open source toolkit that contains concepts from the session in executable form so you can start to experiment with them right away.