UI/API automation asset

Question:

I’m curious to learn how we can make UI/API automation everybody’s asset? Usually, automation developers are the only ones responsible for creating more coverage and there will always be a gap as long as the ratio between the number of product developers and automation developers is not equal. In this case, maybe we should involve product developers in this automation effort?

Insights:

There are two aspects of this question: more involvement of developers in QA and involvement specifically in API automation.

The first aspect depends highly on each company and luckily I'm seeing more companies investing on it. That said, I've been in situations where the developers came from companies in which they have a strong separation between the roles and they are harder to convince for a change. The way I managed to do this was by asking them for help on difficult challenges and getting interested in their job too (without bothering them).

For the second aspect, Devs writing tests for UI/API, I would highly recommend to check firstly their unit test. And maybe get some tool to check code coverage from their side... I've seen a lot of repetition of tests across disciplines.

-- Noemi Ferrera