The lessons that take time to sink in

Have you ever had this feeling that you know how it should be done, and it pains you to see how someone else is doing it in a different way that is just very likely to be wrong? I know I've been through this a lot of times, and with practice, I'm getting only slightly better at it.

So we have this test automation thing here. I'm very much convinced on testing each component or chains of couple of components over the whole end-to-end chains, because granularity is just awesome thing to have when (not if) things fail. But a lot of times, I feel I'm talking to a younger version of myself, who is just as stubborn as I was on doing things as they believe.

Telling the 10 years younger me that it would make more sense to test in smaller scale whenever possible would have been a mission impossible. There are two things I've learned since:

• architecture (talk to developer) matters - things that are tested end-to-end are done by components and going more fine-grained isn't away from thinking of end user value
• test automation isn't about automating the testing we do manually, it's about decomposing the testing we do differently so that automation makes sense 

So on a day when I feel like telling people to fast-forward their learning, I think of how stubborn I can be and what are the ways I change my mind: experiences. So again, I allow for a test that I think is stupid in the test automation, and just put a note of that - let's talk about it again in two weeks, and on a cycle of two weeks until one of us learns that our preconceived notions were off.

I'd love if I was wrong. But I'd love it because I actively seek learning.