Leveling up your test automation and yourself

Presented by: Martin Gijsen, Consultant

Do you ever see test automation as a whole presented as a structured and coherent field of expertise? Few practitioners do, and this results in several challenges for them:

• It is hard to ensure they learn about all areas of the field,
• It is easy to overlook areas in their TA strategy,
• It is even harder to advance to an advisory / consulting level of expertise.

The usual focus on tools and techniques is at least in part to blame: The technical side receives so much attention that there is little left for giving automation high business value (known as ‘building the thing right’ versus ‘building the right thing’ for production code).

Having a better overview helps!

In the first few minutes, the audience will collect many test automation topics. It will then see how they come together in a meaningful, structured overview that is known by the acronym PuPPET: Product, Understanding,

People, Processes, Execution, and Techniques. It will then also see clearly explained its application for:

• Learning (and teaching) the craft,
• Seeing where AI is (and will be) changing our work and what will remain,
• Creating and updating a test automation strategy,
• Planning your career (for anyone from juniors to consultants),
• General communication, between testers and also with other automation stakeholders.

This touches the CfP topics: AI, the value of TA, and a context-driven generic approach instead of ‘best practices’.