A healthy (not a perfect) test suite is important for QA teams who rely on automation to accomplish the heavy lifting of testing in teams that implement CI/CD practices. For small teams, that importance is arguably even more critical as the ratio of work:testers skews high; there are only so many hours in the day after all, and small QA teams often handle duties that run the gamut from solving customer issues to evaluating new SaaS vendors.
So how does a team of 2 manage an automated test suite that runs constantly against 200 feature flags, multiple development environments, and three distinct codebases? We’ll break down how we started, highlight a few important process pivots and pains we encountered along the way, and talk about how we learned to see test maintenance as an opportunity more than a chore.
