In order to begin performing quality practices such as testing in a software project, the software project must first enable those practices by being in good health. You need an agile project that embraces change instead of preventing it. You need a product owner that understands that requirements changes, and management that sees that a plan is not equal to the reality. The team members of the project must understand the value of predictability and the value of doing quality work like test automation.

In this chapter, we've discussed what a developer must know about software projects in order to perform test automation. In the next chapter, we'll talk about test smells, or anti-patterns as they're also called (which are the most common ones), and how we are going to avoid them.