Don’t Be a Fool With a Tool ‒ Fundamental Knowledge for Proper Test Automation

22nd September 2022
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Christian Baumann's profile
Christian Baumann

Principal Software Tester

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Talk Description

How is your automation journey going? Are you a beginner or have you already started your journey, but are still struggling? In both cases, this talk is for you! I will share my own experiences and struggles, and you’ll learn how to bring your test automation to the next level.

Many people get into test automation without having a profound background in programming or without receiving any proper training. They have some idea about what tool to use, gathered some basic knowledge, and managed to create some automated tests with it.
At a certain point, you suspect that something is not quite right with your automation. Your code feels messy and maintaining it is hell, costs a lot of time and frustrates you.

This talk has you covered. You’ll learn about:

  • How to create a proper strategy for your test automation;
  • How to use object-oriented programming principles in your test automation;
  • How to recognize and eliminate code smells


I will present practical solutions to problems I see a lot of people are facing too. I encountered them too. You will walk away with practical advice you can use in your daily work. This will reduce the stress and pain of working, by significantly improving the quality of your automated tests and reducing maintenance efforts.

Note: The talk is not meant to cover all topics in-depth, but to make the audience aware that certain principles and concepts exist. Those will be presented & explained in what context they are useful, so the audience has a starting point for further studies.


Disclaimer: This talk is not about any specific tool or framework. The principles described are generic, and I've seen them work in different contexts.

By the end of this session, you'll be able to:

  • Learn fundamental principles and strategies that can improve your test automation projects
  • Learn about ways to make test automation code less messy and easier to maintain
  • Get guidance on where to start improving your test automation code and receive pointers for further studies to continue your test automation journey with less trouble
Principal Software Tester
Christian is a principal software tester with 15+ years of experience in the field. He has successfully held different roles in the context of testing: Test Automation Engineer, Agile Tester, Test Team Lead, Test Project Manager and Exploratory/ Functional/ Manual Tester. During his career he worked with various test (automation) tools such as Cucumber, Selenium, Watir and others using programming languages like Java, Ruby and C#, but also applied certain development/ testing methodologies such as Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD). Furthermore he successfully applied different manual testing techniques, such as Agile Testing, Rapid Software Testing (RST), Black Box Software Testing (BBST), Exploratory Testing (ET) and Session Based Test Management (SBTM) or ISTQB. Christian is strongly driven by his context, always searching for the best fitting solution for a given situation. He´s able to understand business´ and people´s problems, and is always eager to learn and improve himself, while staying curios, open minded and willing to share his knowledge.
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