How to fail at automation

For the last year, I have been the only QA Engineer for 4 mobile teams at Freeletics. The apps we develop undergo many changes on a daily basis. A new beta would be out every week and, more often than not, our ambassadors would come back to us with embarrassing issues. Our shiny new features couldn’t be appreciated to the fullest because people couldn’t get to them due to blocker bugs. We decided that a stable suite of regression tests is imperative to increase the confidence in releases.

This is how it started. It ended with a suite of Appium tests running in the AWS Device Farm.

In this thought-provoking talk, I will walk you through the 5 mistakes I made on the journey to automated regression tests and how I overcame them.

Mistake 1: Ask all stakeholders for the business cases to be automated and define the scope of the project by popular demand

Mistake 2: Decide on the technology stack and frameworks based on your devs’ preference

Mistake 3: Run your tests on the devices you have available

Mistake 4: Avoid bothering the devs with setup and config

Mistake 5: Make sure you’re the only one who maintains the tests and checks the results

By the end of the talk, you should have an idea on how to lead an automation project in your organisation, how to set up your Appium tests in AWS Device Farm and how to ask for help when you (inevitably) get stuck.