Advocating for a move to a new test automation tool can be a daunting task, especially when you’re new to the company and facing skepticism from your team. The challenges are even greater when the company has changed their approach and tooling a number of times over the previous years.

In this talk, I will share my experience of recognizing the limitations of the existing test automation implementation (test maintenance, test flakiness and lack of flexibility) at my then new company and advocating for a new test automation toolset. Despite the challenges, such as team resistance, concerns over effort and opportunity cost, and the emotional attachment for the current approach – I successfully gained buy-in from key stakeholders and led the transition.

Key challenges I’ll address include building trust as a new team member, overcoming resistance to change, and managing the effort required to adopt a new tool. I’ll highlight how I approached these issues by focusing on quick wins to demonstrate the new tool’s immediate benefits over the existing tooling, and framing the value of shifting the focus from maintaining technical abstractions to writing better domain abstractions that aligned with the expected behavior of the application, versus being coupled to the user interface.

By the end of the talk, attendees will walk away with strategies for advocating and implementing new test automation tools, while effectively addressing both technical and non technical concerns. This includes overcoming team resistance, managing transition challenges, and communicating the long-term benefits to ensure alignment with business objectives.