Hello ,
I am a Junior SQA and I want to ask how to move from Manual Testing to Automation, From where I can start like what do I need to do. Kindly give your suggestions.
Thanks,
Completely depends on “Context” what priority you take these steps, I’ve merely laid them out in an order that they come to me.
• Get all the tools you currently use together, and I mean “all of” the manual testing equipment, understand what it does and what needs updating.
• Work out which tools can “autonomously” perform basic checks for you, these checks need to be very simple things like can I login to the app or install the app, nothing more. Script them up and verify what environmental impacts cause the checks to break.
• Speak to the devs and learn about the build infrastructure and how to start chaining post-build steps in. (nightly or chron test script runs are also good, but post-build or “build-time triggered” automation is more useful initially.)
• Choose to automate only the checks that give “you” value and save you manual testing hours. Keep it small, baby steps. I call them “smoke tests”.
• Once confident the checks are robust and not flakey. Then, add checks that speed up your dev team, like a build sanity test that verifies every single build that builds is “deployable”.
• If deploying a build takes a long time, work out how to deploy only what you need to deploy so that things can speed up.
All of the above need to be interpreted in your context, but you will be evaluating a load of tools and tech stacks and even deciding if you need to build your entire testing stack yourself if a tool does not exist. The sheer volume of mental overload and changes here is scary, but make sure that each thing that helps you gets kept and things that slow you down get chucked out.
Maybe everyone won’t agree but take a look at Katalon Studio. I’ve been using it for a bit and seems a great tool for UI tests and does a great job with API as well. It’ll help take the pressure off the coding side whilst you familiarise yourself with some of the basic concepts.
The idea of selecting automated tests, managing them and the test data, how they can get “flaky”, how automated tests fit into the overall test strategy are all important concepts to get before you start with getting in depth the coding (technical) side.