Automation

The Test Automation Engineer dilemma Your company is growing. You have more customers. You add more features and support more use cases. You can’t afford breakages and downtimes anymore, so you decide to improve the robustness and quality of your testing. In parallel, supporting your growth means hiring more developers, who need to ship fast, with early feedback and limited context-switch, while also sharing a pool of finite test and deploy resources. Covering more or staying fast is often the dilemma Test Automation Engineers face. ...

The context An interesting challenge to tackle in the CI world is how to keep up with dependencies. How to stay up to date when your product requires hundreds or thousands of packages, tools, SDKs, and sometimes services that rely on each other. On one hand you could decide to always use the tip (latest), which puts you at risk of a bad surprise on a random Tuesday morning if the new version of a dependency suddenly introduced a breaking change. On the other hand, you could pin all the updates, and hope to never forget to update them manually. ...

In recent years I’ve spent more and more time trying to continuously optimize my daily routine. Fixing the pain points, and improving my productivity. At the end of the day, it’s all about freeing up more time and being able to focus more on what matters and what I like. As I was thinking about it, wrapping up 2022, I realized how aligned this life mindset is with my Automation engineering job’s principles. At the end of the day, my work is all about freeing up internal customers’ time so they can focus on where they provide the highest value (and of course by doing so, saving the company more money). ...