Comment by jamesfinlayson
15 hours ago
> Writing automated end-to-end tests? Those are very often best done by those writing the software
This so much - but most of the places I've worked at have insisted that manual testers with zero programming experience should build and maintain the test frameworks. Talk about trying to push a square peg into a round hole. Granted some of the testers have embraced it and not done a terrible job but by and large most of the testers have had no idea and done very little.
Building high-quality test infrastructure often requires more skill than building the software it supports. Some of the most impactful work I've done in staff/principal roles has been test infra.
Yep, very very true. Unfortunately some of the places I've been at more recently have believed that mock servers are the best way to do end to end testing. It was a battle I couldn't win, but no one was willing to see that testing critical UI flows against something that spits back canned JSON could hardly be considered thorough testing.