The Way of the Web Tester

The Wheels on the Bus

It didn’t happen all at once. It kind of snuck up on us slowly at first. But we eventually began to notice that the more we used our automated testing framework, the harder it got to add new features to the system.

At first it wasn’t immediately clear why. We had good automated test coverage. We were continuously integrating our changes and regularly releasing the software to clients. We saw no reasons why writing lots of automated UI tests like this should slow us down. But when we dug a little deeper, we discovered a few disturbing trends.

First off, developers had stopped writing a certain kind of automated test called a unit test. These tests were fast, little code-based tests that we relied on to tell us quickly if ...