Introduction
The global pandemic has drastically changed the work environment for many of us. Before Corona emerged in Europe, most of us could be found in the office with the project team for at least four working days. Now the default is ‘work from home’. Working from home also has the necessary consequences for our profession, testing. What challenges does working from home pose for a project team? Can (some form of) test automation provide a solution to some of these challenges?
Challenges
Challenge 1: It is necessary to provide all project members with the same information about the quality of the software at the right time! From experience I can say that the quality of communication stands or falls with the degree of ‘frictionless’ of the communication medium used. By this I mean that communication in teams will go better if the means of communication used quickly lead to results. Let me give an example. If you are at the same location as a team and you want to inform the team that the results of the test automation are good enough to be able to deploy to Acceptance, for example, then this can be shared verbally with the team (‘low friction’). However, if you have to set up a group call or send a (long) email to the group to make this announcement, it becomes a bit more difficult (‘higher friction’). What strikes me is that if the experienced friction with yourself or a colleague is too high, it is quickly decided not to communicate. At my current client we have created a dashboard in Jenkins, on which the results of all tests are displayed immediately. Every project member is able to gain insight into the quality of the software at the desired moment by visiting the dashboard online.
Challenge 2: teamwork is important, but being able to add value to the project solely is even more important In practice I see that many tasks that you would normally do in pairs, for example, are now tackled more quickly solo. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a fact that collaboration over a video connection only works for a few hours a day. Working together via a video connection is very tiring. As far as I’m concerned, an excellent division for a testautomation engineer is three hours of teamwork, five hours of solo work. Test automation can easily be devised by the team and set up independently by the testautomation engineer. The same goes for manual testing.
Challenge 3: repetitive actions in your work are less easy to divide in the team (‘shared sorrow is half sorrow’) The well-known principle among programmers that if you have to do a repetitive action very often, you have to automate the action away, is also important or even more important for testers / test automaters because of ‘working from home’. If you have to work more solo, you can also share less of your repetitive actions among, for example, fellow testers. A good time for the team to automate these repetitive actions away. All forms of automation that support the test process fall under the heading of test automation.
Challenge 4: more solo work, more bugs per line of code If less pair programming takes place in ‘working from home’, but programming is done more solo, it is predictable that the number of bugs per line of code will increase. Good test automation can partially mitigate this increased risk.
Conclusion
Of course, test automation does not solve the drawbacks of ‘working from home’. With the above I hope to have argued that test automation can at least mitigate some of these challenges. Projects that already had good in-place test automation before the corona pandemic have already unknowingly addressed some of the disadvantages of ‘working from home’. For projects that do not yet have good in-place test automation, the above can be an extra argument to finally get started with test automation.
This article is published earlier in the TestNet Nieuws with the title “Testautomatisering in Corona tijd”. The article was published on 18 november 2020.
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