Time: 15-30 minutes
Introduction: Automation is important in testing and you’ve plotted yourself on the pyramid as an automation sceptic or automation enthusiast. With this activity I want to encourage empathy for people with a different point of view, so I’m asking you to switch hats.
Purpose: We should not slide down the slope of the pyramid towards ingrained beliefs and risk falling for cognitive dissonance. One weapon against cognitive dissonance is empathy and putting effort in seeing “the other side”.
Activity: Think about test automation efforts that you have been involved in at work. If you are an automation enthusiast, think critically about the downsides and risks the automation has. If you are an automation sceptic, consider what good the automation did, what did it solve?
Just in case you don’t have any test automation examples of your own, I have an alternative exercise for you. Read this article (https://kentcdodds.com/blog/write-tests), first with your own hat on. Write down why you like or don’t like the point of view on automation this article offers. Then, put on the other hat and write down what you like and don’t like about this article. Try to see both perspectives, the one that comes naturally to you and the perspective that doesn’t come naturally to you!
My example: The last automation activity I was involved in was creating UI automated tests for a native mobile application. I was firmly against it, but the other testers were all for it. Their reasoning was the we lacked flow testing through the UI completely and that was a bad thing. I felt that they were biased for UI automation because I think flow testing through the UI (going from the UI to the database and back) is not something you should want. It takes too long and the tests can easily break.
In the end we compromised by making as few flow tests through the UI as possible. I could not convince them that the idea was wrong per se, but they could not convince me that this type of testing is super valuable. We agreed to experiment with just a few tests so we can see whether it brings value or not before we continue along this path. That I could make peace with and I tried to get them to think critically about this type of tests. They saw my point of view as well and in the end it felt much more like a choice that we thought critically about as a group as opposed to just doing it without much thought.