Who Will Guard the Guards Themselves? How to Trust Your Automation and Avoid Deceit - Bas Dijkstra

With automation rapidly becoming more an important part of any testing process, teams rely ever more on the result of their automated tests as an indicator of product quality. In moving towards a Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment model, automated tests are often the only gatekeeper before software is put into production. But can automation be trusted enough to play this important role in the software development and delivery process? And what can you do to make sure your automation can be trusted enough to be relied on?

In this talk, we'll take a look at the relationship between trust, confidence and test automation. We'll see a number of ways in which test automation can deceive you, how trust in test automation is lost and how you can build tests you can trust on.

• Need for confidence in workings on application under test + application is (partly) tested in an automated manner = Automated tests need to be trusted
• Don't trust automation blindly, as its results can be deceptive
• Trustworthy automated tests can be created and maintained by applying good development practices (reviews, testing) to automation