Learning Test Automation - What's it Like?

I didn't have time for blogging lately as not too long ago I started learning test automation, prior to that I worked a QA, albeit as a manual tester, so my knowledge of automation was theoretical, and very limited - at best. Don't get me wrong, I'm still just a beginner at it, but now I have an idea of what's what and I'm learning new stuff pretty much every day.


I'm mostly focusing on automation with C#, using NUnit and Selenium, which is also proving to be a really good chance to get more acquainted with Visual Studio, which I've used only casually before. Now apart from learning the specifics of automation I try to watch a course or a two on Visual Studio, being someone who was primarily learning web development and using light text editors (I've used Atom, Notepad++, Sublime and mostly VSCode) I'm truly impressed with the power of Visual Studio - the Enterprise edition in particular!



I've done a few online tutorials, but thus far, apart from the advice I got from my mentor, the most helpful have been the Pluralsight courses. Among those that I took and found useful are the following:
  • Automated Testing: End to End by Jason Roberts - a very nice broad overview of E2E
  • Test-driven Development: The Big Picture by Jason Olson - useful overview of TTD
  • Testing Automation: The Big Picture by Jason Roberts -  broad overview of automation

Those three courses above proved to be a good introduction, I've downloaded plenty more automation-related courses for my playlist to watch them as I go. Apart from automation specific courses, I've also been taking courses on C# and .NET, Selenium and as of late Java with TestNG as well.


The course I've been spending most time on, and that I've found particularly interesting is Creating an Automated Testing Framework With Selenium,  by John Sonmez. I used to watch his YouTube videos before every now and then, but I didn't know he was such a good instructor! The course is from 2013, but I was surprised how current it is, another thing that made it appealing was that the test framework in the course is intended to test the functionality of WordPress - a CMS that I've used extensively for freelancing in the past, I don't find it as interesting as I once did, but I'm very familiar with it and feel comfortable testing it's functionality.  Which brings me to another point that my mentor thought me, to automate something you first need to have a good understanding of the business logic for that particular software product - it truly makes a world of difference!

Course mentioned above, uses C# and Selenium, which is just what I need to be learning right now, but also uses MSTest as the testing framework and my point of focus is NUnit. Another part of my learning journey has been researching a bit the differences between MSTest and NUnit and I intend to re-factor the little WordPress test automation framework to use NUnit instead of MSTest.


Getting your automated test to work is quite a gratifying feeling, especially when you run it and watch it do everything "on it's own"! Overall, test automation is a very fascinating IT field, at least in my humble opinion, and while I have a long learning journey ahead of me, it's not as scary as it seemed at first!

Thanks for stopping by!






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