João Proença

João Proença

Expert Quality Engineer at Ada Health

João Proença comes from Lisbon, Portugal, and is a Quality Engineer at Ada Health. He has assumed various roles throughout his career in the past 16 years, including quality assurance, development, customer support and marketing. Finding innovative solutions for difficult problems is what drives him the most, so he is always eager to talk about how professionals are overcoming testing challenges around the world. Outside of IT, João is passionate about songwriting, movies and football. You’ll see him tweet about all of these topics using the @jrosaproenca handle.

Should we just... delete it?

Have you ever looked at a failing automated test and asked yourself… should I just delete it? I’ve asked myself this question numerous times, I’ve trained myself to do so, because I understand its importance. However, I’m often left baffled by colleagues and other testers who reject the idea of deleting a test. Why do they find it such a scary concept?


So the result is that we continuously look and review the same tests, not knowing if they’re mitigating any risks, or worse, not knowing what they are testing anymore. But if you’re like me, you’ve probably looked at some failing tests before that left you thinking “why does this even exist?!”. That trigger is one you shouldn’t ignore.

In this talk, I’m going to share my experiences of listening to this trigger, but more importantly, I’ll explain the actions I take. You’ll learn how to analyze the full lifecycle of an automated test to truly understand its value. We’ll talk about the total cost of ownership of a test, and how it is a key analysis factor when attempting to reduce feedback loops. I’ll bring some stories from the company I work for to support this. After all, we’ve gone from automated regression environments running thousands of tests overnight to a CI/CD reality.

I love my delete key, I hope to share the love!

Agenda Talks


QA Automation Con

10:15 to 11:00
02 Nov 2023

Should we just... delete it?

Have you ever looked at a failing automated test and asked yourself… should I just delete it?