Who let this guy in here?

The last few weeks have been a great learning experience for me - I can officially say 'I can write code'.  ... It will be bad code, to be sure, but it's code!

I had the opportunity to (be allowed to) pursue what I deemed a high business-value target - introducing test automation (outside of unit tests).  One PluralSight course later and guy thinks he can dev.  Spoke to our QA guy, and he was enthusiastic, a few other devs mentioned it was a good idea, so hay, here we are.

The course:  https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/automated-testing-framework-selenium

In C# no less, which our team has been using a fair bit.  We're still in early days, but the repo has grown quite a bit - now have tests/framework pieces across 3 different applications.  I have absolutely zero development background (aside from PowerShell scripting and basic tutelage of a few sharp folk over the years), but the need was there.  Somebody had to do it!  (they will rue the day, at some point)

Test automation is a cultural shift for us - there are now active discussions on how we can ensure this gets added into our 'definition of done', what it means to our overall process, and when should we and should we not do test automation.  Good conversations!

Further...we have caught 3-4 "embarrassing" bugs thanks to the tests, so our customers are unwittingly happier, not to mention the folk writing the code!

I suspect it'll take quite a while to be fully adopted, but that is okay with me.  Lots more to learn...I will keep working to make things better.

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