Golden rules are abundant in software engineering. You should have a simple micro-services design, do TDD while pairing, deploy 42 times an hour with 4 variants of A/B tests, and always eat your vegetables. However, real life pragmatic considerations will lead every organization to make compromises. Whether you’re a startup going quick and dirty in order to survive or an established company that maintains some older code, you may get to a point where you must improve your testing or even start it from scratch, while moving forward and adding features. In this session I will explain how it can be achieved, sharing hard learnt lessons on practical automatic testing strategies while on the run.