STAREAST 2007: Positioning Your Test Automation Team as a Product Group

Test automation teams are often founded with high expectations from senior management-the proverbial "silver bullet" remedy for a growing testing backlog, perceived schedule problems, or low quality applications. Unfortunately, many test automation teams fail to meet these lofty expectations and subsequently die a slow organizational death-their regression test suites are not adequately maintained and subsequently corrode, software licenses for tools are not renewed, and ultimately test engineers move on to greener pastures. In many cases, the demise of the test automation team can be traced back to unrealistic expectations originally used to justify the business case for test automation. In other words, the team is doomed for failure from the beginning. Steven Splaine describes a creative approach to organizing a test automation effort, an approach that overcomes many of the traditional problems that automation teams face establishing themselves. Steven's solution is not theory-it is a concrete, "proven in battle" approach introduced and adopted in his organization.