Top 3 Automation Things You'd Setup For a New Company?

Ken recently asked on Slack:

I am currently looking for a job, and most, if not all my prospects require a dedicated QA Engineer position, wherein everything test automation related will start from scratch. What top 3 things would you setup for a new company, if nothing was set in place? I am thinking, API Test, Integrate test/code coverage on CI and E2E happy path.

What would you set up?

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My top 3 (random order):

  • Mutation Testing

When developers say they write unit tests I donโ€™t always trust them with it. so a setup of mutation tests to check how good the unit tests are would be lovely!

  • Test data automation

a lot of companies struggle with getting test data and a lot of testers set it up manually. so the automation of test data creation is a pretty must.

  • a CI/CD pipeline

A lot of people still have to push a button to run some tests or do something else. I would prefer to setup a CI/CD pipeline where all those things are triggered by eachother. (API tests, Security tests, UI, performance, Reporting, โ€ฆ )

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As I mentioned in my post Anatomy of test automation, there is a lot more to Test Automation then the Test suites themselves.

So if I was starting from scratch, I would take a step back and try and work out where the team is at, and where it needs to go.

For me, the first three problems to tackle are:

  1. How can the System Under Test be stood up and and configured automatically to allow automated testing to be carried out in isolation.

  2. What test data is needed, and how can I control the SUT and put the system in the required state

  3. What is the most critical path that MUST work for the product to be in a releasable, functioning state. Depending on the system and what risks are identified, this will inform what your first test should look like.

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