Who tests the SDET’s code? Sanity testing of the automation framework

Unit testing is an important part of any development project. Since it is expected that developers will write unit tests for the functionality of the application, so too it would be reasonable that the SDETs write unit tests for the framework code base itself. However, the terms “unit testing” and “integration testing” often cause confusion when applied to the automation framework itself. Let us refer to this aspect as “sanity testing of the automation framework”, although it is really unit testing of discreet framework functionality and the integration of those features. These are scripts written to intentionally test the viability of the features in the framework. Like the previous “Hello, World” example, test automation has a version of sanity testing that exercises each of our advanced methods. Since automation is a development project, we should...