Thanks to Matt Stratton, I found out that I do have an RSS feed if you'd rather read that. It is http://blog.testyredhead.com/rss.aspx.

Yesterday was a great work day for me. After much complaint, ranting, and worry, I am now in charge of writing the automation plan for our team. It seems that rather than just catagorizing me as someone who is "anti-automation" and telling me that I either comply or get out, a few people are willing to believe that I'm just anti-bad automation, automation where it doesn't belong, and the wildly irresponsible assumption that everything automated is somehow better than everything which is not. Why is this good news you ask? Because I have some ideas of how to reduce the likelyhood that the automation we are working on will become useless to us and a waste of time.

I'm putting the plan together with the following new ideas.

1. All of the automation time IN will be tracked. Just as we are using Session Based Test Management for our thoughtful hand crafted tests, we will also be using this for Automated tests. This means while creating them, investigating problems with them, sifting through results, and maintaining them, that time investment will be tracked and reported. The fact that almost all automated test plans are missing this makes me cry into my pillow at night. Representing an accurate picture of the automation costs is a vital part of making a good logical decision about the value of automating certain tests. This is going to take some evaluation on my part, and as a new process I'm sure it will be refined as we go along.

2. Protecting areas which really NEED thoughtful hand crafted testing. This is like a wildlife preserve. I get to set aside a "no drill zone" for those areas I feel would be destroyed if left to the robots.

3. Using automation to make session based test management easier for all tests. I have an idea for making this sexy, and no, I'm not talking about perl and text files my friends. I'm talking about some lipgloss on that pig. This is something I can get excited about. I'm a big believer in experimenting with the visual presentation of data, and I have some tinkering to do in this area.

4. Pimping out automation other people already made. I call this, maybe we can create a sexier wheel, but that doesn't mean it's cost effective. Now,..everyone into the shopping cart and we're headed for the Hawaii! Wish us luck! (glub glub). I kid, I kid. We will try to at least provide a hearty rubber raft with patches when we go out in the open ocean.

That reminds me of a story. On our 3rd date my boyfriend and I went to the lovely Ballard Locks here in Seattle. If you haven't been, you really should go. He noticed some Yachts going through and talked of his dreams to have one. I told him that I thought they were a pretentious waste of money, and my dreams involved a rubber raft. He told me that he'd be glad to tie a rope on my rubber raft and was pretty sure I'd not be so against his Yacht when he invited me in for mimosas. I think this analogy applies to my team in this case. I just need to make sure we don't rope up to the Titanic. We don't need a yacht as much as we need a tow in our rubber raft. Being so far away from the Ocean is an entirely different experience when you need a close view of the state of the water.