Key lessons

To me, one of the most important aspects of this story is that uSwitch decided to focus on improving quality instead of trying to implement any particular process (for more on this, see “Focus on improving quality” in chapter 4). Instead of a big bang approach, they constantly looked for the most important thing to improve and began work there. When they were comfortable with the resulting change, they inspected the process again and moved on to the next issue.

The realization that testing was a bottleneck and that QTP was too expensive and bulky for developers to work with led the team to adopt Specification by Example through functional test automation, an approach I suggested in “Start with functional test automation” in chapter 4. They first adopted Cucumber as a way to automate functional tests but then realized that they could get a lot more out of it because it enabled them to automate tests while keeping them in a human-readable form. This turned the specification process on its head.