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Benefits of E2E Test Automation & Continuous Testing (Part 4: to Developers)
Programmers become more efficient and satisfied
Non-Medium-Members: you can view this article free on Vocal Media.
Continuous Testing (enables software teams to push software updates to production daily. Not fake CI/CD talks. Check out “Continuous Integration at Facebook” and AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading) is the heart of the software development process. It benefits all stakeholders of a software project.
- Executives
- Managers
- Business Analysts
- Developers
- Testers (automated & manual)
- Customers
Developers spend 50+% of their time doing manual testing, anyway
You might have heard about the joke above before, of course, it went too far. But at least give you a perspective that programmers do spend a lot of time fixing wrong code. As we know, testing is a part of bug fixing.
If I tell you that programmers who work in an agile team, typically spend over 50% of their time on functional testing applications, you will probably be surprised. As a matter of fact, as a professional programmer for over 20 years, I would say 50% is a conservative figure. I have to admit that I only realized this after I mastered the real test automation, which helped me to see this fact plainly.
Let’s examine how a programmer implements a new software feature (e.g. user story) for a web app.
- Design
- Write/debug code
- Unit testing (only good programmers can really do this well)
- Deploy to the local server instance
- Verify the functions: open browser, log in a user, …, etc.
- If issues are detected, go back to step 2.
Step 1 (Design) is usually quite light in agile teams. Among the four repetitive steps (2–5): Step 3 & 5 and a part of…
