Matt Heusser blogged today on generating new ideas. In his entry, he cites from Weinberg’s Becoming a Technical Leader. Weinberg lists up the three obstacles to innovation – one of the three parts of his leadership model. The three obstacles to innovation are self-blindness, the No-Problem syndrome, and the single-solution belief. Continuing he explains the three keys to innovation based on this: Learn from your errors, learn from others, and copulate together two great ideas to form an even greater idea. Matt also mentions my struggle to find an article where a great software test automation framework became shelfware just because it couldn’t stand the technical challenge – or maybe just the human aspect of it? So far, we just found opinions on software test automation projects having failed, but no real hard data.

So, to overcome this lack of available material, let me write about my experience with software test automation, the problems we had, and how we overcame them. Thereby, I will not only enable myself to learn from my own errors, but also provide a system you may copy yourself, or which you might combine with another great idea that you have established in your company. In fact, most of this shouldn’t surprise you. During the last year, I also presented our approach on a test conference – here‘s the paper I wrote on this.