Jennifer Bramble, Willowtree Apps
Creating automation engineers from manual testers is hard. Even if testers are willing, they have a lot of hurdles to get over to feel like the same kind of subject matter experts in automation as they are in manual testing.
As a career-long manual tester making the leap to automation, Jenny Bramble has the experience to explain frustrations and provide solutions. She will discuss managing the expectations of testers and their managers (what’s the time frame? Why isn’t this working?), techniques for teaching (such as games! Pair/mob programming! Software fundamentals!), and how to know when testers have made it (what should manual testers be aiming for when they start?).
Key takeaways include:
You’ll walk away from this talk with a powerful new set of tools in your toolbox:
- The basic framework your manual testers need to be successful including how to determine where the gaps in knowledge are and filling them.
- Advice on managing the expectations of your testers and management from time constraints to what success looks like.
- Several methods for teaching framed around a case study of a team that built itself up from the inside out and is running a successful automation suite.
- Facing and overcoming other challenges such as ability and perceived ability, resources, time, tooling, and how to get your team excited for a new chapter in their professional development.
Jenny Bramble, 2019 Technical Presentation, Paper, Slides
