Hi, I am in the process of learning test automation, Selenium + Java at the moment. It seems that still, the best way to learn it is some kind of apprenticeship. (But there is an issue that there you will not learn best practices, just this given person/company practices). Most courses just skim topics, are not project focused, and do not talk about common problems and connected tools.
What was your approach to learn, do you have any sources to recommend? Is test automation your line of professional work?
My advice to learning test automation in this form is: don’t
Look up the testing trophy, try to do everything using any tool but Selenium until you absolutely have to. You’ll notice that you can come very far using integration tests, you’ll also notice the tests are fast and reliable. Something selenium tests rarely are.
For frontend, look at testing-library or storybook with test runners. Former is more lightweight but a hassle to debug, latter is heavier but much more visual and easy to maintain. Both are not flaky and fast and easy to run in a ci pipeline.
Run your tests as close as possible to the logic, you’ll get the quickest feedback.
Once you’re done with all this, make a happy flow E2E test or two. And I’d use typescript instead of Java. Then you have some hope of a frontend dev wanting to help you maintain it. And playwright instead of selenium, simply more modern and thought out
Wow, thank you. Well that’s refreshing and educational, not everything you hear again and again, finally.
tests are fast and reliable. Something selenium tests rarely are
Yes, this has been my experience with Selenium so far. We actually have to set our tests to retry 3 times because of flaky Selenium issues causing failures
I just rewrote a test to bypass Selenium and use a different method to accomplish the same task and not only should it be more stable but the test ran in half the time
unfortunately all of our front end tests are very Selenium driven so rewriting them will probably be a lot of work, and of course I don’t have the luxury of being in possession of large amounts of free time
Best resources to learn test automation, keep up with trends in it?
This was one of the main reasons I asked for the software_testing community to be created
I moved into test automation at work (Selenium and C#)
but I learned by ‘drinking from a firehose’, essentially I had to browse the existing codebase and ask questions in team chat or private messages to the other team members
I’m hoping this community can get more activity from long-time testers and provide some good resources for people who want to learn!
Yes, exactly, having people to expand horizons with, talk through things, exchange experiences and ideas with would be awsome.
I see that for testers it takes longer to form a community, but there is a huge potential. Do testers still feel like they don’t belong?
How it went for you? Must have been really stressful.
I recently found https://testautomationu.applitools.com/, seems interesting.
yeah learning all about automation was a bit stressful because our company had re-organized teams so there was a lot of new people on new teams
but I’m lucky because now our company really wants to focus on quality, so test automation is a big part of it
I’ll check out that link, its funny because my company is looking to purchase a license for an Applitools product. I’ve had a few meetings with people from that company already
Cool, let me know if those are good
