Learn about three essential test automation design patterns to enhance your testing strategy and improve software quality.

In an ideal world, every code deployed into production would be without defects, but we don’t live in a perfect world; humans still build software for other humans. In our practical world, testing catches those defects in a last line of defense before the software reaches the end-user. It’s a big responsibility.

Understand how agile technical debt affects test automation and discover strategies to manage it effectively for better software quality and team productivity.

What makes test automation key in bringing products and apps up to speed is that it's fast, efficient, and can cover a ton of ground. However, the main challenge of test automation is articulating a test script (the output of the test analysis process to exercise test cases) in a way that a machine can interpret for execution purposes, essentially creating machine-readable test scripts. Usually, companies hire skilled automation engineers or SDETs to rearticulate test scripts in coded form. Automation for most organizations is a translation exercise from human-readable form to machine-readable form, essentially re-articulating the output from the test analysis process in another form. There are apparent efficiencies to implement in this process.

Understand the 5 key characteristics of testability in software engineering to enhance your testing process and improve software quality.

There’s been an increased demand for several roles related to Quality Assurance (QA) such as Quality Assurance Engineers (QAE), Automation Testers, Software Developers in Test (SDT or SDET), Performance Testers, or hybrid QA Engineers. However, what do these imply job-wise? Perhaps when we look into possibly applying or hiring someone with experience in testing or automation, we’d need to better understand the different roles and responsibilities in software testing teams. At the moment, nearly all companies rely on some kind of test automation as the source of truth for quality verification and, in some cases, quality validation. However, there is still the need for humans to be on the other side of the tools we use for automation. When we adopt a quality mindset and understand every role to identify the best fit for our company we ensure that we can get a team that is talented and aligned with the goals.