The goals of automated testing
Testing is more than creating a safety net. Let’s talk about its multiple facets.
In an agile mindset, the team is responsible for the delivered software. In this scenario, QA is ensured by the whole team. Automation is a core tenet of DevOps culture, meaning developers should write automated tests. Manually testing everything does not scale up and is incompatible with continuous delivery. QA-specialized people should be doing other types of work like exploratory testing, usability testing, acceptance testing, etc.
Automating everything — from build to tests, deployment and infrastructure — is your only way forward. The Practical Test Pyramid
According to the xUnit Test Patterns book, there are multiple goals of test automation:
Tests as specification
Tests are like the floor plan of a house (although in software development, we can iterate); they define the system’s behavior, or in other words, what is expected: as soon as tests go green, they lock the implementation to that contract (design by contract). That’s how precious and precise a test is, given…
