Friday, October 25, 2019

A Book Commit: MetaAutomation #30DaysOfAutomationInTesting Day Two

I am writing this series based on the requirements for the "30 Days of Automation in Testing" series as offered by the Ministry of Testing. yes, I realize I am almost 18 months late to this party but work requirements and a literal change of development environments have made this the perfect time to take on this challenge.

Let's take a look at the Day Two requirement:

Begin reading an automation related book and share something youʼve learnt by day 30.

In a sense, this is actually a re-read but a first time full apply. Several years ago, Matt Griscom approached me when I was visiting Seattle and told me about an interesting idea he had for a book. We exchanged several emails, talked about a few things here and there, I looked over some early chapters and from that (and lots of talking to other lots more qualified people than me, believe me ;) ), Matt came out with the book "MetaAutomation".

Today, that book is now in its 3rd Edition and last year Matt gave me a copy and encouraged me to give it a read. Now that we are making this product transition over to C# and .NET Core (so as to work better with other teams who are already using that stack) it seemed a very good time to take Matt up on that offer :).

Here's a bit from the Amazon description of what MetaAutomation is all about:

"MetaAutomation describes how to do quality automation to ship software faster and at higher quality, with unprecedented detail from the system under test for better communications about quality and happier teams.

This book defines the quality automation problem space to describe every automated process from driving the software product for quality measurements, to delivering that information to the people and processes of the business. The team needs this to think beyond what the QA team or role can do alone, to what it can do for the broader team. Quality automation is part of the answer to all that is broken with “test automation.”

MetaAutomation is a pattern language that describes how to implement the quality automation problem space with an emphasis on delivering higher-quality, more trustworthy software faster. Much it depends on a radical, yet inevitable change: storing and reporting all the information from driving and measuring the software product, in a structured format that is both human-readable and highly suitable to automation. This change was not possible before the technology made available by this book.

Read this book to discover how to stop pouring business value on the floor with conventional automation practices, and start shipping software faster and at higher quality, with better communication and happier teams."

I have to admit, on the surface, those seem to be bold claims and from what I read in the previous versions, there's a lot to digest here. thus, I'm actually going to be trying something out during this month. If possible, I'm going to try to approach the rest of this month's activities, where relevant, by referencing this book and trying to see if I can use the principles in my practice. Thus, in addition to doing a full form book review at the end of the month, I hope to have had a chance to actually and completely internalize what I read here. In short, Matt, I'm not just going to read this book, I'm not just going to review it, I'm going to try my best to live it. Let's see what happens if I do exactly that :).




No comments: