My Greeting to Testers and Automation people! My name is Piyush Srivastava, and I’m working as Tester in functional & Automation for around 6 years on various projects as a Senior Consultant and SME. Now I’m working in *Luxoft * where I got great chance to upskill myself in better way. I wanted to share some API_ testing capabilities for the testers.
With the help of this article, I wanted to encourage you to start using this in your daily work or at least give it a try it will increase your performance knowledge for sure.
*Please note i I'll be adding more skills as i have around 10-15 skills will add the same in later stage of post. *
In the accelerated agile way of working, every firm demands a highly-skilled automation tester. Slowly, automation testing is replacing manual testing(though it cannot be done completely). Automation Testing is the key to the business success of the software industry. With automation, you can expand your business to a larger audience saving both time and effort.
As an automation tester, it is very essential to have certain skills which help in testing the application better. Let’s understand in the article, the automation testing skills required to be an efficient and successful automation tester in the software testing industry.
How does test automation benefit the software testing industry?
Replacing manual testing processes with automation testing has helped in the rapid adoption of agile methodology across software development industries.
- Automated testing benefits large scale projects that undergo frequent changes by speeding up the testing process and making deliveries within the stipulated timeline.
- Manual testing in agile requires a lot of human intervention and the overall testing effort becomes tedious, automation testing helps solve this problem by automating the repetitive tasks.
- Usually, for repetitive tasks, test scripts need to be created once and these can be reused every time the same scenario needs to be executed.
- With every feature enhancement, the scripts can be updated as per the requirement and then can be reused.
- Automated testing expedites the overall testing process. Automation testing can reduce the time to run repetitive tests from days to hours saving time and money.
- Automation testing increases the depth and scope of tests that improve the software quality and also increases the test coverage of the application modules.
- The automated test scripts can be reused multiple times for any frequent change in the software.
- Automation testing helps the DevOps team to ship the software to the market at the earliest.
What are the skills needed for an automation tester?
Let us look at the top must-have skills for an automation tester:
i. Focus on analytical thinking :
For an automation tester, an instinct for analytics and logical application of concepts is important. Once the business team provides the business requirement document, the automation testing team should focus on understanding every aspect of the feature very well from an automation perspective.
The automation testers should raise queries in the agile refinement ceremonies to bridge any gap that can be a prerequisite in automating a certain functionality of an application.
The automation testing team needs to think and identify areas of the functionality which can or cannot be automated and define a detailed automation test strategy. The testing team should plan a walkthrough session with all the stakeholders specifically to discuss the automation testing approach for a feature.
Automation testing teams should collect ideas from all the team members and use the same to formulate the test plan document. In the test plan document define the scope of testing, automation testing approach, execution timelines, etc. Analyze how the test cases can be automated as per the priority.
The automation testing team can plan internal training sessions to discuss the automation testing approach. Also, the resources can share knowledge on certain automation tools that can be best utilized for the current project.
The testing team can discuss the estimation effort for automating each module of the software. This includes test designing as well as execution effort. Critical thinking is important to properly test software, write automated tests to cover defects in the software.
ii. Understanding of programming languages :
To be a successful automation tester, the tester should have a good understanding of programming languages.
Mostly the automated test tools use programming languages like Java, Python, Perl, Vb script, etc. The automation tester needs to be proficient in these programming languages. The thought process of the automation tester should be to identify and cover all the possible modules that demand automation.
The automation tester must have good coding skills in order to design the test scripts. Self-learning is a good way to get acquainted with these programming languages that can help in designing the automated test scripts.
Though it is not required today that you code your automated scripts with scriptless test automation, it is good to know the basics.
The testing team needs to ensure that the code conforms to certain designated quality standards. Along with maintaining the overall quality of the software, it is indeed essential to design easy to understand test scripts. Such that they can be understood by everyone in the team at a high level.
The team usually has an added advantage if they have an experienced automation tester in the team. Their previous project experience can be utilized in designing test cases and test suites.
iii. Good functional testing skills :
To excel as an automation tester, the tester should have sound knowledge and experience of functional testing performed manually.
It will be beneficial if the tester along with the application knowledge also understands the domain very well. For e.g., if a wholesale banking application requires payments domain knowledge to design automated test scripts of any given functionality, then it will be an added advantage if the tester along with good scripting skills also is well versed with domain-specific knowledge.
Automation testers should be well aware of the manual testing process and the test techniques that are adopted in the testing phase. It can be challenging and time-consuming for automation testers to design test scripts without having good functional knowledge of the application. If the automation test team has good exposure to the functionality they can achieve good test coverage and better test accuracy.
As manual testers are well acquainted with the STLC, Automation testers also need to understand the STLC (Software test life cycle) very well. This is required to know how the testing is performed at each step. This also makes automation of the manual test cases easy.
iv. Expertise in creation of test scripts:
In the market, there is a wide range of automation frameworks, out of which some will expect the tester to have sufficient programming knowledge when it comes to writing automated test scripts whereas for some tools the test scripts are written in plain English language and do not require an understanding of backend logic and coding.
Most of the organizations in today’s date are using the Cucumber framework for test automation. In cucumber, as the test scripts are designed using plain English language, sufficient knowledge on Selenium WebDriver is enough to create the test scripts.
Automation testers should have programming knowledge if the organizations are dependent on automated tools like UFT (Unified functional tester) or QTP (Quick Test Professional).
The automation tester should develop the test cases with the aim of saving both time and effort during the test creation as well as the test execution process. An automation tester should have a good grasp of programming languages like Java, Python, Ruby, Perl, Vb script which are widely used, these days, in most of the automated test tools.
For a web-based application, the automation tester should be able to develop efficient test scripts for functionalities such as submitting a form, to generate a popup, to upload a file, etc. Estimating the complexity of an application, an automation tester should be able to create test scripts for a small as well as large module in the application.
Much before designing the test scripts the automation tester should question in the agile refinement sessions if there’s any unclarity on any requirement or functionality. This is the base step before creating the test scripts. Once the tester has better insight into the application, it becomes easier to create test scripts as well.
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