Automation

Cover more or deliver faster? Last week I laid out one of the CI/CD (Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery) engineer dilemmas: cover more, or deliver faster. Brute-forcing both by throwing more machines at the problem works for a while, then stops working when the test suite runs for hours and rarely comes back green on the first try. But speed and coverage don’t have to trade off against each other, and there are ways to speed up integration and delivery, while aiming for high quality. All you need is listing your requirements (more on that later), in order to choose the best strategy. ...

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 vs integrating and deploying faster 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). ...