Abstracts

Most testing professionals have heard of the automation pyramid, yet a variety of organisations I've encountered find themselves in a position where they have too many end-to-end and UI tests. This problem isn't new, but some of the tools (AI) and technologies (frameworks) we have available are.

UI and end-to-end tests are slow (taking minutes to run rather than seconds), flaky (causing hours of investigation, watching back Cypress replays and rewriting when selectors change) and often owned by a small number of testing professionals. Working towards the traditional test pyramid embodies shift-left testing by moving validation as early as possible in the SDLC. Rather than finding bugs in production (shift-right) or even in a test environment, prioritising the automation pyramid enables a way of working which catches bugs during development, where they're cheapest to fix.

This talk covers how I've worked to fix inverted test pyramids and the effect it really has on achieving organisation-wide quality. The answer to a UI- or end-to-end-heavy set of test cases isn't another framework; it's a deep understanding of the critical assertions that should be made about your system at every level of the test pyramid.