"Every Rose Has Its Thorn": Taming automated tests beast.

Automated tests are just great, right? All kinds: unit, UI, functional, integration, acceptance.

Really?

They are your responsibility, they have to be maintained, they are your baggage too, they may slow down your project to a halt, they can doom you … unless you are careful and think instead of act blindly.

This session shows various common but costly mistakes and misconceptions around automated tests on various abstraction levels which often lead to serious problems in software projects – especially those long-lived where a lot of automated tests get accumulated over years.

The presentation demonstrates those practices, design decisions and organizational changes which helped us steer our projects through the waves of automated tests hell. A lot of examples and remedies base on my experience with Atlassian JIRA – a Java-based product developed now for about 10 years with many thousands of automated tests on various levels of abstractions and using various technologies.