Often overlooked test automation challenges

The company I work for develops several different products as part of a unified offering. These products need to work with each other and with products from other companies. Each product development team has its own manual QA and automation team, and we have a solutions testing team that ensures interoperability between our products and others. The company has been pretty ‘siloed’–each product’s automation team has worked mostly in isolation from the others.
Until now, the interoperability testing has been all manual, but the manager of that team has embarked on an effort 1.) to get the different automation teams familiar with each other and their work, and 2.) to leverage the automation efforts of the various product teams in the interoperability testing effort.
To that end, we’ve started holding a weekly cross-team automation meeting, with run by the interoperability testing manager with a representative from each product’s automation team. The agenda consists of the following:

  1. Product configuration automation
  2. Test lab usage management (automated check out/in of lab resources
  3. Automation strategy
  4. Test management and reporting

What’s striking is that each product automation team has put in significant effort to address all four of these functions (with a lot of duplicated work!), yet when we think about test automation, we typically only think about #3, the actual automated tests themselves.
Just an observation. When we think about test automation, we need to remember that there are several complex components to it besides the tests themselves.

Clever job-hunting move

I can’t say I condone this, but it’s a clever way to see how you stack up against the competition:

After a fruitless job search — endlessly scanning Monster.com and Craigslist and tweaking resumes and cover letters — he grew more curious about his competitors. So he created a fake Craigslist ad for an administrative assistant position and, in one day, received 653 responses from applicants with a wide range of education and experience.

Sneaky. Not ethical. But sneaky.