Among software testing professionals, a big chunk of people are into manual functional testing. I heard many of them saying "Manual testing is a boring job", "I am not paid well compared to a Performance Testing professional or Automation Testing professional", "I want to learn Test Automation / Performance Testing", etc. Many of them fail to get into either of them. The reason behind this is that many testing professionals are allergic to coding. Even some of them left software development because they did not want to continue writing software code.
If you have made a decision to learn test automation, then I want you to ask few questions to yourself. First and foremost is "why you want to learn automation?". If the answer is "I want to get better pay package", then it is better to rethink learning automation. Because it is a myth that people who are technical are paid better than others. If you are not good at coding, being on test automation might not be a good decision. According to me understanding the business functionalities and writing good test cases is also not an easy job. Functional testers having immense domain knowledge are given much more importance than automation testers.
There are people who were into functional testing but are very much interested in coding. They feel good being on test automation as it is like software development work ("code to break").
Here, I am not discouraging anybody who want to learn automation. Just, was sharing some of my thoughts.
Here are some tips to start learning automation.
To start with, it is better to put some baby steps in test automation. Pickup any of the test automation tools such as QuickTest Professional, Selenium, TestComplete, etc better would be QTP. As QTP is an user friendly tool it will be easy to learn. Try learning some of the features of the tool such as Recording and Play, Object Repository, generating reports and some of the other features which you can easily understand. Try to use the tool in your day to day work. For example, if there are test cases in which many forms have to be filled then automate these tasks. This will bring down the burden of mundane tasks and also keeps you on track.
One of the other tool to learn would be Selenium which is an open source tool. This can be downloaded free of cost from the internet. Use this blog (www.selftechy.com) to learn Selenium.
What else you need!! Start!! Happy Automation!!
Hi Seetaram,
Thanks for the useful thoughts…….
Regards
Vikas
Thanks Vikas…
Excellent…
Thanks Manoj
Excellent Description !!!!!!If you post more about the difference between and what are the difficulties faces by manual and automation tester .It will useful for your forums.
Can you explain or brief me what are the QUALITIES required for Manual tester to became proficient in his field.what are the qualities he/she needs to enhance his/her career .Describe in two scenario i.e as a fresher/experience(After 3 years).
Thanks
Sri
Hey Guys don’t compare manual and automation testing. Both have its own importance, i would prefer to say that Manual testing is Core of testing because without manual testing you can not carry on automation testing. Automation testing is new and lot of people may not be aware of it, So here the matter of Quality and Quantity comes into the picture. I think we should not worry about whether the manual testing is better or automation testing. I tell you few points why automation testing is getting too much fame:
1. Its new and most of people are not aware of it.
2. There are fewer automation tester in market as compare to manual tester.
3. Manual tester thinks that automation testing requires damn good coding skill, which makes automation testing little bit terrible.
4. Due to short deadline of project, every company wants to deliver quality product with in given timeline. So for regression testing company do not want to deploy more testers, they just prefer automated scripts.
But its a bitter truth that in industry automation tester gets paid better than the manual tester.
No need to worry, automation is not tuff its very easy but its tricky. I worked as manual tester but i now do both manual and automation. Currently i am working on Webdriver and i alone automated application on Webdriver. So as per my experience, Manual testing requires yours logical skills and automation requires your practice and little bit technical knowledge.
Now guys you decide which one is better manual or automation.
Vikas,
I agree with you on some points you have made, but whether the automation is easy or tough depends on the kind of application we are automating. If the application is large and if there are hundreds of test cases, then the automation as well as the execution of those test cases becomes complex. As you said learning automation is not that tough and also you need not to have that much coding skills. Definitely we cannot compare manual and automation testing as both of them have pros and cons as a career
really awesome..it helped me a lot thanks a lot for the wonderful information…
Btw, nice article, i have to tell you that i was allergic to coding, that allergy stems from mental block for typing, i would say those who want to start coding, must make themselves to type the code without looking at the keyboard, first and foremost. The only way to get rid of that allergy is to learn to type without looking at the keyboard. Download free typing software and allot time, to learn typing. Your main focus is to build accuracy first and then focus on speed without sacrificing accuracy. This is the only surefire way to get rid of allergy to coding. I am writing this post because I was like them previously, but gradually you can get proficient in coding. Need to learn more, refer “The First 20 hours” by Josh Kaufman, i would recommend anyone who wants to build skillsets.
Hi vikas ,
Awesome description thanx to describe difference between manual and automation testing . i m also learn to automation this is very helpfull to me…thanx again.