No More Shelfware—Let's Just Drive Test Automation

When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be: Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we still have shelfware sitting around expensively doing nothing, all because we don’t know how to "clean the spark plugs"? Can we remove the difficulties and make using test automation a better experience, just like driving a car? Isabel is researching testers’ experiences of their toolsets and automation to identify what issues exist and whether it is possible to improve the behavior and enjoyment of using these tools. Join Isabel as she shares ideas about applying UX to tools acquisition, and learn to assess the user/tester experience (UX/TX) of test tools.