A Story of a Senior IT Manager Fears Real Agile, But Talks Highly About It

In 2020, I worked at a large financial institution. My agent told me that this IT division's director was an excellent IT leader who loved Agile, test automation, DevOps, CI/CD, and wanted to change the industry.

There was an online (due to covid) division Skype meeting (100+ people) in my starting week there. This IT director said: "We should be more open-minded. In particular, why can't we push updates to production every month? ….";

In the same meeting. The principal software engineer announced the ebook library this company purchased (via a provider). Later I checked it out, the highest ranked book on test automation was mine: "Selenium WebDriver Recipes in C#".

My work in test automation has raised some interest as my automation script helped reduce a typical ~4 hours of manual testing time to ~6 mins. The team leader was deeply impressed. He had never expected automated test scripts could be created so quickly, and even manual testers could understand. Moreover, manual testers could use automation scripts to assist their manual testing, i.e. test data creation. Besides, all automated UI tests were run in a CT server many times a day.

The value of test automation was clearly shown in the first week. I was told that this company (which adopted agile 15 years ago) has never seen Automated E2E Testing could be so real and useful, and done so quickly (a couple of key business scenarios were created within the first day, by me).

By the way, if you are interested in my approach. Check out AgileWay Test Automation Formula, all using the free, open-source, standard-based, widely used frameworks.

Hence, a meeting was organized to show this capability to the managers, including the above-mentioned executive director.

In the meeting (Skype, Covid time), I showed some slides (from my past conferences) and live demonstrations of running real tests. I concluded by saying, "Test Automation and Continuous Testing enabled frequent releases. Facebook releases twice a day, and I have been releasing all my apps on a daily basis since 2012. After developing a set of E2E Functional tests here, I am confident that continuous testing shall enable the capability to weekly production releases". (I was quite reservative, did not say deploying to production every day)

During the meeting, there were only a few questions raised by the attendees. The director was about 5-min late to join the meeting and did not say anything. The principal software engineer asked a layman's question “will it support headless testing?”. I think he knew the solution was impeccable (I showed the slides of recommendation of the framework by Facebook and Microsoft), and asking improper questions might embarrass him. (later I learned that the last disastrous test automation attempt was partly his work). Towards the end, a senior program manager said: "It looks good. We will work out something …".

Later on that day, my agent asked how the meeting went.

I said: " I felt that they probably would not want to do test automation or frequent releases, or real Agile".

He was very surprised: "The executive director said he really wanted to do release early, release often".

I replied: "Yes, I heard he said that myself. However, in my opinion, the director just likes the idea of test automation and frequent releases, but fears real implementation". Then I told this "Lord Ye Loves Dragon" story.

It turned out that I was right, no actions. Until I left, functional testing was still conducted manually. A few months later, I saw a Job Ad for a Senior Test Automation Engineer from this company. Interestingly, the selection criteria listed "scripting in Java, C#, JavaScript and Python", excluding Ruby, the only language (of Selenium's official five) that I used and proved working there.