Learning Automation Skills as a Tester

Original Question:
I am into manual testing so far. Need to move to automation testing. I have worked on automation for around 8 months. I have knowledge of selenium with java. Can anyone pls guide me on how I can master automation so that it could help me to switch from manual to automation?

Did I also switch to Automation Testing? Yes, I am a Developer (2016) Turned Automation Tester (2018) Turned Tester (2020). Hopefully, my insights would be helpful as I have seen these three sides in my career.

Here are my few cents on this topic:

  • Get a Pair Learning Partner: Have one!
  • Do you know there is an Automation Testing Roadmap created by Testleaf. Check it out HERE.
  • Start small, But START! How?
  • Learn by Repetition: Study, Make Notes, Share Notes (with your learning partner, community) & Revise, Create a project on things you have learned (Do It Mode!), etc.
  • Spend time on Basics. How? Pick & Study each node from start to end from the Automation Testing Roadmap.
  • Learn to use stack overflow, ask questions, and googling. These are powerful skills.
  • Get a mentor: Seek help. Not sure, where to start? Check out the mentorship program by The Test Tribe. Of course, It’s FREE.
  • Help others to understand their context and then learn from it. I have learned most of the things from this approach.
  • Know all the amazing resources for learning automation. Don’t know much yet? Check out the Learning Resources Chapter of the book, Ultimate Productivity Toolkit.
  • Do small automation projects.
  • Get a good grip on Programming Language (at least one). How? Start with Hackerrank exercises/challenges.
  • Write Unit Tests for Open Source Projects – I have been procrastinating this for a long, Hopefully, I would do this in 2022.
  • Hard Truths:
    • Think beyond selenium, appium, xyzium if you really want to master automation.
    • Tools are a service to automation, Tools are not automation!

I would like to conclude this post with this amazing quote by Lalit Bhamare.

As a tester, if you are not helping your stakeholders to identify & mitigate the risks, feedback on quality & advocating for bugs, and instead automating everything & running jobs for green PR then you are only adding to the carbon footprint and nothing that customers pay for!

Lalit Bhamare

Of course, It doesn’t mean that automation is bad! It just means that know your context, purpose, intent, and vision before just being blindly driven by this new toy 🙂

Happy Learning!

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