Test Automation as a Service Team - Jurian Jilderda & Jarsto van Santen

13th January 2023
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Jurian Jilderda's profile
Jurian Jilderda

Test Automation Engineer

Jarsto van Santen's profile
Jarsto van Santen

Specialist Test Engineer

Test Automation as a Service Team - Jurian Jilderda & Jarsto van Santen image
Talk Description

In January of 2017, the "Service Team Testautomation" was founded at DUO (part of the Netherlands Ministry of Education). The aim: getting our roughly 40 DevOps teams to properly use automated tests. In the initial mission statement, the main focus was on finding technical solutions. The mainline of thinking was: if you build the right stack, the automated tests will come.

As some of you may have guessed: it's never that easy.

Let's look at a few of the problems we ran into:

  • Is ‘built by testers’ actually the right approach?
  • Does 'the right stack' even exist?
  • How do we get people to use the stack we've built, the right way?
  • Can we balance 'can we automate this' and 'should we automate this'?

In the end, we’ve overcome all these issues and managed to turn this experiment into a success, with a major impact on the way testing is done in our DevOps teams.

We’ll discuss the answers we found and the lessons we've learned along the way. Whether you're looking to support others in using automation or looking to automate some tests yourself, hopefully, this talk will save you the trouble of making some of the mistakes we did.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to:

  • How to find/build the right (or good enough) stack
  • Don't stop testing when you start automating
  • Teach what you preach
  • Build support for automation (managers matter)
Jurian Jilderda's profile'

Jurian Jilderda

Test Automation Engineer

Jurian is a test automation engineer at DUO in Groningen, the Netherlands. He's been testing for over 10 years now. Having started out as a manual tester who liked to automate tests, he's now become a test automator: building frameworks & supporting and teaching fellow testers - together with the rest of the Test Automation Service Team.

He lives in Assen, home of the famous Dutch TT race, with his wife and three kids. When he's not at work he can be found coaching his son's football team and supporting his local church. If there's nothing to be done on those either he likes to exercise, run, Netflix, or game his free time away.

Jarsto van Santen's profile'

Jarsto van Santen

Specialist Test Engineer

Jarsto has been playing with code for a quarter of a century now, having started at 11 years old. Despite studying law he eventually saw sense and turned his hobby into a career. He now works as a Specialist Test Engineer at DUO (part of the Netherlands' ministry of Education).

At work he is active in the Automation Serviceteam - developing internal tools, helping and teaching colleagues, and looking critically at what should and should not be automated - as well as taking on testing-related matters that affect the entire organization, coordinating with specialists from other DevOps disciplines, and advising management as needed.

In his free time Jarsto is mildly obsessed with world history, science fiction and fantasy, and all sorts of technology he doesn't get to play around with at work (yet). Somehow he never has the time to watch as quite many movies/series, read quite as many books, or play quite as many games as he thinks he should.

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