When joining a new engineering team, one of the first things I do is familiarize myself with the dev and test processes. Especially the tools used to enforce them. In the past 5 years or so, I’ve noticed that a lot of organizations still use older tools that haven’t yet evolved to support modern practices. Even teams that purely develop software can find themselves working around cumbersome systems that hinder instead of enable.
What do I mean by that? Very few of these tools include useful interfaces to leverage integrations with other systems (like REST APIs). Most have no concept of modern dev practices like continuous integration or containerization. Almost all of them want to record pass / fail at a step by step basis as if you’re executing manually. The vast majority are built around a separation between test and dev (some even emphasize it). And a lot of them require the organization to hire “specialists” for the purpose of “customizing” the tool to the team. In my opinion, these types of systems coerce the organization to emphasize blame over quality and team boundaries over productivity.
I’ve been very successful at building long-lived alternatives to these systems in several organizations. I’ve done it enough to know which features are worth including, and which to leave to the test / dev engineers, especially after the advent of continuous integration and delivery.
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