What do people mean when they say "automation is a tool"?

24 Mar 2025
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Emily O'Connor's profile
Emily O'Connor

Principal Quality Engineer

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Talk Description

In Emily O'Connor's first 404 talk, she discusses her understanding of the meaning of “automated testing is a tool”. 

When performing exploratory testing, testers learn a lot about the system under test, but by the time automation is written - testers are only putting into code fixed assertions, meaning that automation does not provide new knowledge and is used as a tool to save teams time searching for regression bugs.

Emily O'Connor
Principal Quality Engineer
She/Her

Technical leader with a sixth sense for bugs. Avid learner, passionate about translating "dev-speak" to enable teams adopt automation and AI-accelerated quality engineering. I believe great software starts with user-focused problem solving, and automation should surface the bugs that PMs actually care about fixing.

Emily O'Connor
Principal Quality Engineer
She/Her

Technical leader with a sixth sense for bugs. Avid learner, passionate about translating "dev-speak" to enable teams adopt automation and AI-accelerated quality engineering. I believe great software starts with user-focused problem solving, and automation should surface the bugs that PMs actually care about fixing.

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