Don’t automate everything, review everything

In this episode of Software Testing Live, Ben Dowen is joined by experienced quality engineer Emily O’Connor for a software testing live episode around the art of the pull request (PR).

Pull requests are the means by which new code is contributed to a codebase. With AI coding assistants becoming more commonplace it’s more important than ever to critically review the automated tests being added.

If you’re the only tester adding automation in an organisation or are used to having your automated tests reviewed by software engineers, you might not have done a PR review like this before!

Rather than testing an existing application, this session will see Ben and Emily dive into automation best practices, providing constructive technical feedback, and potential automation traps you’d want to avoid well before a PR is ever opened.

 

You’ll learn how to:

• Approach reviewing a pull request and review the user story under test for automation gaps
• Use tools to your advantage for repetitive parts of a pull request; linting, code quality checks, dependencies etc.
• Provide technical feedback that persuades others not to merge code just because its already there
• Understand how the additional automated tests will fit into your existing pipeline runs
• Create maintainable, self-documented automation suites
• Identify acceptance criteria that should be codified into automated tests
• Review the automation pyramid to ensure tests are introduced at the appropriate ‘level’