Thoughts before MoTaCon: Stability and Systems

Pranav Pandit's talk 'Stability is a system, not a metric: lessons from scaling mobile test automation', for quite a while the message of pushing automation as something that will fix our problems has been sold to us. I'm not anti-automation, we should always automate what we can, what makes sense and what creates efficiencies, but I'm also interested in how test automation is changing.

I'm interested in the connection between stability and system. They flow and sound like nice words together, but how is it changing our quality practices across the org? When we work across the system, do our metrics/goals become shared? What does that look like in practice?

Does what we care about start to change when we put an emphasis on stability and the system? Do we start to see test automation suites as a hindrance? What does the system think of our work? 

When I think of our systems, I think of 'flow'. When test suites become a bottle neck, that doesn't only impact confidence, it impacts the flow of work, and the ability to ship.

I love a good model, or way to think about this. But I also love good practical stories. It's easy to preach how to do things. It's easy to say do x, y, z. But reality often looks different.

I'll leave on a final thought, not directly related to testing, but more from the aspect building community as a system. The deeper we've gone into this kind of mindset, the more I love my work. And the more I love my work, the more I can't help but see beauty in the system.

So one angle to look at it is, how does stability and system thinking help us see a more beautiful approach to our quality work? Or where do we see beauty show up as a result? Looking at the beauty helps us see progress, how can we look at the quality work through this lense? Perhaps the more we give focus to that, then we will see more value in the work we all do.

Yes, this is a bit of a ramble, hey ho!