A Story: Principal Software Engineer Undermines E2E Test Automation

Not everyone likes to see the success of E2E Test Automation.

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A few years ago, within the first week of onboarding at a large financial company, my End-to-End test automation scripts (driving the app in Chrome browser) showed great help to the project team. Business Analysts and Manual Testers used automation (either requested me or self-help, I built an interface for them) to create test data scenarios (cutting time from a typical workflow operation from 40 to 6 minutes).

Someone up in the mangement noticed that. A 3-month Proof of Concept (POC) was created for me to implement an already defined set of E2E Tests. I implemented them in 3 days, yes, 3 days instead of 3 months, using my typical tech stack (Selenium WebDriver + RSpec, run in a BuildWise CT Server).

Before I left work, I sent the POC daily update and the URL to test execution reports on my BuildWise Server. On the second day, in the email response from the principal software engineer, he advised me to “slow down, for quality”. My reply: “I have always been working this way, never compromising on quality (of automated…