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Trusting automation

Trust & Automation

The word trust, what springs to mind when you hear that word?

Often we hear this word regarding companies like Facebook and Google. We like to think that we can trust these companies but like with the recent Facebook and Cambridge analytica story, that may not always be the case. Yes, we can complain and say how outrageous it is but at the end of the day if we read the terms and conditions as well as all the other small print we would probably all have a rough idea of what we are setting ourselves up for. After all if the application is free there is probably a catch.....

Trust can be defined as:

noun
1.
reliance on the integrity, strength, ability, surety, etc., of a person or thing; confidence.


Now trust is important when that reliance is required by us in order to perform our roles as testers. In this article I am taking about trust in the automation space…..

Why do we need trust in our automation?


We need to know that the automation that is been developed and run can be relied on to provide the results in which it claims it should (There may not be any explicit claims but there will probably be plenty of implicit assumptions made by people about the automation). If as testers (and a team) we don’t trust the automation then what is the point in doing it? Companies can invest a lot of time and money into automaton and if this is not trusted then all that investment is totally pointless. We need to know that when we come in in the morning, that CI build that has been run, has run a suite of automated tests that we can trust. Now you could say that by trust in the automation what I actually mean is having trust in the developer(s) that write the automation. This, although true, (after all they are the ones that code the automated tests) teams that fail should fail together. So who is responsible for producing automation that everyone trusts? Why of course, the entire team. 

By having automation that we trust can give us testers the freedom to test the areas of the system that would not get touched by the automated tests. We can write charters, delve and explore the system which we otherwise would not be able to do. Imagine if the automated tests were not trusted…..

Inside Testers Head: 

“Mmmmmmmm build is done and latest release is deployed. I need to start testing…… oh hold on a minute!!! Those automated tests don’t fill me with confidence. No one has reviewed them and  person who wrote them is not known for their attention to detail. OK if thats the case I will pull the acceptance criteria from the user story and I will test that these scenarios behave as per the acceptance criteria. Yes that would be the 'safest' thing for me to do.”

Not a great scenario is it? Although the automation has been coded, the tester does not trust it, and they are just running through acceptance criteria. What about that bug which will bring the system to a standstill when a particular edge case occurs? Tough, probably not going to get found. The tester is basically running through the tests that have been automated, which is a total waste of time. Now as you explore a system of course you are going to touch upon areas that have been automated, that is expected, but you shouldn’t have to go through the exact same tests as those that were automated. 

 There are some other negatives in this scenario as well:
  • The tester is not using their thinking skills. They are basically performing scripted testing. (At a slightly higher level)
  • They will have a negative bias towards the developer because they will always think that their automated tests are not that great
  • The tester may get bored
  • The developer will never know that their tests are (in the opinion of the tester) not trusted

How do you build trust?


Like all good things building trust takes time. It is not something that magically appears ones day. It takes work on both sides to build it and it is essential when working in a team.

You can build trust in an automation framework by doing the following:
  • Test the areas that have been automated to see if automated = exploratory
    • You could manually test what has been written in the automated tests. By this I mean test the high level scenario, not test the exact steps that have been automated. Yes this is a duplication of effort (as I have mentioned previously) but over time you will start to have a level of confidence in the automation as well as the people that are writing the automation. If your positive tests reflect what is happening in the automation then you can  start to trust those tests and the people who write them. Then in the future you can stop testing what the automation tests and focus on other areas. It may require some help from the developer to understand what the tests are doing but an advantage of this is that you can view some of the test code and hopefully understand some of it. 
  • Review the tests with the developer
    • Running through these tests with the developer will expose you to the test syntax as well as what the tests are doing. By doing this you can also help the developers by pointing out areas that need changing, which will help the developer grow their testing ‘mindset’ which in turn will give you confidence in the automation. This is where learning to code is useful. In my opinion testers should at least learn to read code, in a perfect world they should be able to code. I don’t see much of a future for testers without coding knowledge and skills.
  • Write some of the tests
    • Now automated frameworks like specflow require a ‘user understandable’ scenario to be written. If you can write some of these it will give you confidence that certain scenarios have been written and are covered. Now yes these should be defined in the acceptance criteria but there are bound to be some that have been missed and this is a great opportunity to cover these off. Now how can you trust that the developer has implemented the underlying code correctly? Well… you can’t. In any workplace there has to be a certain element of trust to start off with. You probably trust that a developer can write the code behind the tests, after all if you didn’t you will probably drive yourself crazy!!!
So there are a few ways you can build trust in automation.

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