Keeping Your Perspective

For those of us who've been in IT for many years, the number of new and exciting technologies, paradigms, methodologies and philosophies around us right now can seem overwhelming.  Ideas that started in small shops, startups and incubators are now reaching in to even the most conservative of industries. Even my own industry, dental insurance, is starting to adopt agile practices.

It can be difficult to find your way through this barrage of new ideas: We want continuous integration and continuous delivery and your framework needs to support our particular flavour of agile but it also needs to support our legacy waterfall apps but we're not going to call them waterfall any more and also we need better reporting and traceability and and and ...

At times like this, I find it very helpful to take a step back and re-orient myself around a single, simple tenant:
   My job, as automation engineer, is to support quality.

Let's unpack that a little.  Quality means different things to different people and organizations.  You might measure quality with defect metrics, you might have some sort of federally mandated guidelines, you hopefully have a set of functional and non-functional requirements your are gauging against.  Regardless of how you measure it, your job, as an automation engineer, is to do everything you can to help ensure quality.

Functionally, test automation is a component of overall QA. If your core QA practices are shaky, the best automation in the world will not save you.  Everything you do as an automation engineer need to ultimately serve to bolster QA.  Whether you are part of a small team or have an impact across the enterprise, this holds true.

I use this tenant every day.  We are in the midst of developing a new enterprise-wide automation framework.  Keeping my perspective on "support quality" helps me filter through the options when choosing technologies and methodologies.  It helps me to remember who the stakeholders are when I'm designing elements of the framework, such as reporting.  It helps me figure out the how when tasked with something like adding testing to our CI setup.  Hopefully it can help you too.