How did it get there? How would you improve it? What were/are the barriers if any? What tips do you have for improving and maintaining a good test culture?

<aside> 💡 Hola friends! We recently created a Discord for Software Automation where we discuss these kinds of topics on a bi-weekly basis.

Responses range from people with 0 to 30+ YOE in the industry and wanted to share this with the community!

Below are gathered discussions, enjoy!

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Abstract Summary:

The discussion revolves around the testing and automation culture at various companies. Participants share their experiences, ranging from highly advanced and integrated testing practices to more chaotic and inconsistent approaches. Key factors that contribute to a strong testing culture include:

  1. Treating test code as equally important as application code
  2. Involving QA/SDET in the development process early on
  3. Adopting a team-wide commitment to testing and automation
  4. Investing in robust test automation frameworks and tools
  5. Continuously monitoring and improving the testing process

Barriers to achieving a good testing culture include resistance to change, lack of buy-in from management and developers, technical challenges, and prioritizing feature development over testing.

<aside> 💡 Below are the shared discussions, enjoy!

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mike-lahar shares:

At my company, we (QAE/SDET) are responsible for maintaining and improving the testing/CI environment. We are constantly adding new tools and test suites for the various code/languages on our platform. Much of the code is quite legacy, so maintaining that can be a bit of a pain 😉

We also write tests here and there. Or help out the other developers with tests and test cases.

I think one way that we’ve improved is having QAE/SDET “live” quite close to the other developers. Meaning that the testing is just as important as the regular app code. QAE joins in as part of the code review.

derrtybird07 shares:

I work at a very large entertainment company (non-faang). Our automation is a massive custom framework built on top of Selenium and Appium and other custom applications. It's a beast and it's really cool, but i fear it's going to hurt me for future jobs. I don't have the opportunity to learn Playwright and while it's close to Selenium syntax it's a bit different

ChopSuey shares:

We have no idea what we're doing and we're working from the ground up , we just have okay programming skills as our foundation as a team. We're also on our third framework in three years due to bad decisions by management but I think we're finally stabilizing now that we're just using open source code rather than being reliant on a third party app.

We are under the QA department and unfortunately don't interact with the dev team at all really