Test automation is commonly perceived as a technical job, which should be done by technical people. In reality however, a considerable amount of non-technical activities contribute to the creation and maintenance of an automated test suite. Whilst test engineers are arguably competent at non-technical testing tasks, they may not be as competent or even as motivated as people who come from a manual testing background. Furthermore, in the context of most systems, especially web-based systems, automated testing would also benefit from people with primary skills outside of testing. These include developers, information architects, business analysts, customers and so on.This talk explores ways of harnessing the experience and skills of people with different backgrounds and channeling them towards the effective test automation of web-based systems.
