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Comment by 1111111119 | Hacker News Reader

what do you think a world class automation engineer does?

Improve testability throughout applications by working with their team, setup and maintain test frameworks (hopefully improving them over time), determine what tests should be automated and those that shouldn't, write automated tests, coach team members on writing automated tests and testing in general, add new tools/processes to improve testing, investigate the application in-depth to find risk areas.

I'd be curious if HN think the above includes things that shouldn't be there or is missing a number of items? I'd be curious what the 80/20 for an automation engineer looks like?

I think there's a change occurring recently (last 3-4 years), especially in the larger tech companies with respect to this role. There are still programmers dedicated to writing and maintaining the automation infrastructure but most of the test are expected to be written by feature developers.

Understanding the build system and devops in general is important because if the teams you work with use continuous integration then the test systems interfaces with it.

I work on a team dedicated to making build and automated test reporting better (see my profile) so obviously I have an interest here but I think great reporting is often overlooked and it's crazy because all of the effort involved in automation and writing tests is only valuable if everyone can see the benefits and resolve failures immediately.

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