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The Top Resources Around the Web For Learning Selenium WebDriver

April 17, 2018 By Alex McPeak 1 Comment

learn selenium online

If you’ve found that manual testing just isn’t cutting it anymore, your first instinct might be to learn Selenium online in attempts to catch up with test automation.

Learning by yourself is a tall task, but it has been done before. Luckily, since so many people have gone through the same thing, there are plenty of resources for learning Selenium — you just have to know where to look. That’s why we’ve rounded up some of the highest rated and most popular tutorials, videos, and websites to help you get on the right track to test automation.

Free Tutorials

  • Guru 99 Free Selenium Tutorials – Guru 99 is a go-to source for testers, and their Selenium tutorials do not disappoint. In an effort to turn to from a beginner to a Selenium automation pro, these sequential tutorials cover everything. Even if you don’t follow the order, the Selenium tutorials is a great page to bookmark and go back to if you get stuck.
  • Selenium Easy – Selenium Easy offers automation testing tutorials with working step-by-step examples to help you through the fundamentals on to more advanced concepts. They even have a demo site full of basic examples to get you practicing with Selenium off the bat.
  • Selenium WebDriver Training with Java Basics – Udemy offers an abundance of courses to learn Selenium. Some of the more extensive classes can get pricey, but this free class is a great option to get started and learn the basics. The course is highly rated and reviewed and promises to train you to automate any web-based application with Selenium by the end, even teaching Java from scratch.
  • Richard Bradshaw’s Free Selenium WebDriver Course – Richard Bradshaw a.k.a. The Friendly Tester is no stranger to the bustling test community. One of his biggest claims to fame besides being the Ministry of Testing BossBoss is his Free Selenium Webdriver course. Covering drivers, navigation, locators, interactions, and much more, the text and code is supplemented by videos on The Dojo to help you get better acquainted with Selenium.
  • Selenium Tutorial – Tools QA has a Selenium Tutorial for learning the basics in Java. This is for anyone who’s brand new to automation since it goes through learning Java and setting up Selenium, but there are guides for everything. You can move on to learn more advanced Java actions and more complex Selenium commands, plus there’s plenty of information about frameworks and even Continuous Integration.
  • Software Testing Help – Software Testing Help is another great support system for testers trying to make the transition to automation, and these tutorials start from basic concepts through advanced topics like framework creation, Selenium Grid, and Cucumber BDD. As you make your way through these tutorials, you’ll find that writing an automated script is much more manageable than you previously thought.
  • Selenium 101 Series – Our comprehensive Selenium 101 Series gives you the tools you need to succeed with test automation. By tackling the most common Selenium challenges, CrossBrowserTesting provides a convenient and digestible resource for polishing your skills, including features like our interactive Selenium anatomy, knowledge quiz, and test automation ebooks.

Paid Tutorials

  • Selenium 2 WebDriver Basics With Java – Alan Richardson is another tester whose name you’ll see often. This paid course is an in-depth look at Selenium WebDriver and its usage patterns and aims to increase your ability to write effective automation code. Alan’s extensive experience makes him a great teacher, making this is a popular course that always receives rave reviews.
  • Automated Web Testing with Selenium – Pluralsight hosts this intermediate course to help you level up your Selenium skills by helping you use C# to automate browsers with the Selenium API and distribute tests with Selenium Grid. The course also highlights the implementation of a simple framework to use with Selenium to make tests more maintainable. Pluralsight offers other courses in addition, which means you can keep building your skills after you’re done.
  • Complete Selenium WebDriver with C# – Build a Framework – Nikolay Advolodkin is very talented when it comes to Selenium, which means that this course is a no-brainer for anyone who wants to improve their tests by building their own framework. As the #1 Selenium instructor in the world, following his footsteps will put you on the road to the master class.
  • Selenium Academy – CrossBrowserTesting – This course shows you how to use our Selenium grid for your tests including how to run tests on mobile devices. While you do need some prior knowledge, it’s a great resource for getting started with a robust cloud testing tool like CrossBrowserTesting. In addition, Selenium Academy has an entire course catalog in your preferred programming language covering everything automation.

Other Resources

  • Selenium HQ – If you want the most accurate information, go straight to the source. Selenium HQ has all kinds of helpful documents to help you get up and running.
  • Ultimate QA – In addition to Selenium tutorials, Nikolay also regularly blogs and publishes lots of informative resources for familiarizing yourself with Selenium.
  • The Automated Tester – Another blogger, David Burns knows how to talk automated testing. He’s constantly publishing great content and even has some Selenium training available.
  • Selenium Conference – There’s no better way to learn from the experiences of people that actually use Selenium than by going to an in person conference. Selenium Conference is the place to be if you want to break into test automation.
  • Twitter – Many people have been in your shoes before, and even the most skilled automation engineers had to start somewhere. The good news for you is that most of them are very active on Twitter and are constantly sharing their tips, tricks, and advice when it comes to test automation, so be sure to check them out and give them a follow.
  • Stack Overflow – Got questions? Here’s where you come for answers when you hit a bump in the road. Stack Overflow is where over 50 million developers and testers go to share their knowledge, so you know there will be someone to help out with any kind of problem you run into, no matter how small, specific, or simple it may seem.

Testing is an active industry, and the community is constantly talking about ways to automate more effectively. Fortunately, this means you have many resources at your disposal to learn Selenium. This list includes some of our favorite content but just skims the top of everything that’s out there. Take the time to talk to other testers and see what worked for them, practice often, and you’ll be writing your own tests before you know it.

Filed Under: Selenium Tagged With: learning, professional development, Selenium, test automation

Building a Learning Culture

March 21, 2018 By Mike Talks Leave a Comment

building a learning culture mike talks professional development tester

building a learning culture mike talks professional development tester

Going to a conference can be an amazing and wondrous experience. The best way I can describe the feeling of a great conference is “Disneyland … for testers”. It’s several days of meeting key thinkers in your discipline, being bombarded with big ideas, and playing about in workshops with new technology.

But sadly of course, all good things must come to an end. And when you return to work, there’s a battle to incorporate those big ideas or to try out that new technology. You can sometimes feel on your return that everyone’s going, “brace yourself, Mike’s going to push for TDD again”.

This, I have to admit, has been my experience – it’s not possible for everyone in a team to attend a conference, especially when it’s overseas. And hence it’s left on your shoulders to be an ambassador and evangelist for what you’ve learned. In this experience report, I’ll look at some of the things we’ve been trying to do in my department to bring the spirit of conferences into our working week.

Moving Forward

I feel that everything changed for our department back in 2013 with our shift to agile. Before that, everything was very command and control – seniors would work out how we’d do things, and those instructions would be filtered down as “a list of things you need to do”. Agile put everyone more in the driving seat, and it needed them to have the capability to act in a multi-skilled role, or have the maturity to seek someone else out when they were out of their depth.

At the same time, our portfolio evolved into new technology in terms of supporting mobiles, photo technology, using automation, shifting our security framework, infrastructure refreshes, monitoring production behaviour as well as up-and-coming tech and features such as AI for facial recognition. We had been thrown well and truly out of the “test the functional requirements” playpen.

The company I work for has one of the best support for training courses I’ve ever known – you find a training course, you can be pretty assured of attending. The problem was in some areas, things were so relatively new, there was no established training course to “just sign yourself up to”.

Thus we found ourselves circling around “how do we keep ourselves relevant”. We seemed to go back and forth for several months over what the ideal way forward would look like. Then one day on Twitter, I had a revelation when I read the oft-used quote “a year from now, you’ll wish you started today”. THIS WAS US! We needed to just get started – as long as we started something, we could adjust the forum if it wasn’t working.

So I started with something we called the Technical Tester Study Group – pulling together a group of testers from across my organisation. The idea was we’d meet every fortnight and more than anything we’d focus on hands-on activities.

We started off looking through the basics of Java, which as you can imagine was pretty popular. I led these sessions where I would introduce a couple of concepts and set an exercise for people to work through on their laptops.

Each session, people would bring in a laptop, I’d demonstrate a basic concept in Java, and then they’d complete an exercise where they’d use it. At the end we wouldn’t have covered a lot, but we covered it in depth. We had both made mistakes and learned from them, ending up with a concrete example to build on. [I’m personally a fan of this mistake-driven learning, which I call “solving messy problems”. We typically learn a lot from our mistakes]

It took about ten sessions to work through the Java basics, and then we worked through some basic Selenium, using it and the Java we’d learned to open pages, check for content, and manipulate elements of them.

Up until then, I’d been leading sessions and using material I’d built up over the years, but always it was about doing more than just being “the Mike Talks show”. With just me leading it, people would only ever get as smart as me … and there is room for improvement on that!

Collaborative Learning

I got one of my technical testers to create a session on how browsers work, where I have to admit I learned a few things. And before Christmas, one of our team ran an interactive session on using a Robot framework.

We also got in a few guest speakers:

  • A friend working in AI to talk to us about their work in machine learning and chatbots, which turned into a three-session workshop of building our own chatbots.
  • A member of the tools team within our company talked to us about how Nagios and monitoring in production worked.
  • One our AWS gurus talked to us about how infrastructure is built with AWS, and how it can be tested.

I currently have one member working on a security module to do at a future day, with another looking at doing the Robot framework step-by-step. I’ve also used the group to try out material – often when I submit to workshops at a conference I can say “I know this material works because I’ve tried it”.

I’ve had great feedback from the Technical Testing Study Group, but it’s become a hunger to do more. My team has spearheaded testers taking a more hands on approach to automation, and we’ve been running an Automators group. The approach here is vastly different – we created a series of goals for the group and use a Trello board to map learning objectives. Each session, there is some kind of assignment to members of the group who then have to report back on what they’ve achieved and how it went.

Example assignments have included:

  • Collating ways our automation fails and leading a meeting on addressing some of the issues
  • Moving some of our automation to a new design pattern and why we’ve adopted that pattern
  • Reviewing why we’re trying to achieve with our smoke tests and seeing if we can optimise them

A key thing from the team has been to not be afraid to take a tangent and try something new. The task “keeping the board green” (our tests passing) was something we spent a few sessions on, and it began to feel like a Sisyphean task. The group encouraged each other to just “move onto something else” and park it for a while.

Staying Relevant

Fundamentally, learning helps to keep you and what your team doing relevant. At conferences, you give yourself time and space to try new things, and this is so vital to reproduce on some level in your working week.

Perhaps you’re thinking “but my manager won’t approve this”? My experience is that most managers are really receptive to these ideas and actually might come at you with suggestions of things to try. Just make it clear what the goals are, and how you expect it to deliver value. We, for instance, use a monthly survey for our Automators group to show how peoples’ confidence and engagement is increasing.

Find a way for your team to get some space and some play time to learn. The thing which has really stood out about these sessions is how much fun they’ve been – I’ve got to see people in my team really shine, which has sometimes surprised me, but also the level of humour we can engage in because we’re a team who trusts and respects each other.

Stuck for ideas? Why not ask someone who’s run a conference workshop you attended about their materials and have a go at running it in your team? But fundamentally, don’t worry about getting it right. If your team has a good level of energy in it, you’ll find a way to course correct.

About the Author: Mike Talks is a Test Manager at Datacom in New Zealand and author of the book How To Test. Having been in the IT for over 20 years, he’s learned to embrace reinventing himself like David Bowie as the industry and its needs evolve around him. Turn and face the strange – ch-ch-changes! To learn more, follow him on twitter @TestSheepNZ. 

Filed Under: Test Automation Tagged With: conference, learning, professional development, tester

From 0 to 100: How to Go From Manual to Automated Testing

October 16, 2017 By Alex McPeak Leave a Comment

going from manual to automated testing QA

Manual tester to automated testing speedometer

Test automation is all the rage these days, but breaking into the role of an automation engineer is challenging, and sometimes it might seem like more trouble than it’s worth. When there’s still a clear need for manual testing, what’s the point of you uprooting your current ways just to follow the trend?

Though going from manual automated testing may seem daunting, it’s about much more than adding a skill to your LinkedIn profile. In fact, your future career could depend on your automated testing strategy.

Why Do I Need Automated Testing?

  • Faster testing – Your current process might be working for you now, but as a tester, you should be striving for more ways to get faster and more effective at your job. And besides, manually testing repeat test cases must get pretty boring. Learning automation lets you get regression testing out of the way so you can focus on the fun stuff, while simultaneously allowing you to test more software in each sprint.
  • More and more teams are automating – Automation has been steadily adopted by companies to improve test efficiency, and today 44 percent of tests are automated on average, according to the SmartBear State of Testing survey. Not only that, but testers broadly believe it will become even more popular the coming years as more organizations shift to Agile.
  • High in demand – Because more teams are getting on board with the practice, test automation skills are becoming increasingly valuable. Testers that know how to code and are familiar with tools such as Selenium and Appium are the ones that will stand out when it comes time to make a career move. If you find yourself in the position where you’re looking for a new career, it’d be beneficial to have at least a base knowledge of automation and the corresponding technologies that these companies are embracing.

4 Steps for Moving to Test Automation

  1. Learn a programming language – As mentioned, learning a programming language is becoming a valuable skill for testers to have. It’s never too late to learn, but it’ll also be the biggest adjustment when adopting automation practices since it wasn’t previously needed for manual testing. In fact, learning to code will probably be one of the most difficult parts of learning test automation, as well. However, test automation is impossible without coding knowledge, so it will be something you need to know. We usually suggest starting with Python since it’s often easiest to pick up for beginners and there are countless resources for learning such as Treehouse or Codecademy. Additionally, other skills like XML, HTML, CSS, XPATH, and SOAP are often preferred.
  2. Adopt the right tools and frameworks – You’ll make the process a lot easier on yourself if you use a combination of frameworks, open-source tools, and third-party tools for automation. Sorry to break it to you, but you can no longer solely rely on your mouse and keyboard. Selenium WebDriver will probably be the foundation of your automated testing approach as it’s by far the most popular, which is convenient because you can use any of the new languages you learned. You can learn more about getting started with Selenium here. You’ll also want to familiarize yourself with testing frameworks like Nightwatch.JS, Cucumber, and Protractor, libraries like Capybara and Watir, and Continuous Integration tools like Jenkins CI and TeamCity to get the most out of automated testing. On top of that, paid tools like CrossBrowserTesting will make your life a lot easier when it comes to run test across different browsers. Alternatively, if you haven’t learned to write scripts you can use Record & Replay for lightweight, codeless automated testing.
  3. Start small – The smaller your test cases are, the easier they will be to debug, maintain, and reuse. You don’t want to go crazy with automation and write heavy test cases, or you’ll just make your life harder in the end. Keep them separate and labeled so they’re easy to identify and share in reporting. On that note, you’ll also have to prioritize which tests you want to automate in general. Just because you have this newfound knowledge of automated testing doesn’t mean you should apply it to everything — in fact, it’s virtually impossible to automate everything, and many things are better off being done manually. Polish off those exploratory testing skills when a new feature is released and run risk analysis for which parts of your application should be automated. In addition, you’ll want to create a list of the browsers and devices that are going to be essential to your particular test automation plan.
  4. Back to the basics – Keep practicing, learning, and using your resources. Automated testing might seem intimidating when you’re first getting into it, but all it really takes is time and patience to learn the craft. Also, no matter how good an automation engineer you are, there’s always more to learn, so take comfort in knowing even the experts don’t know it all. Luckily, there’s also a lot of resources at your disposal. Between online guides, forums, conferences, meetups, communities, social media, and even Slack channels, there is no lack of help available at any time when you have a question or are just looking for some guidance. The testing community is robust, active online and offline, with many people who are happy to provide guidance and mentorship.

Additional Resource for Learning Automated Testing

  • StackOverflow
  • Selenium 2 WebDriver Basics with Java
  • Selenium Guidebook and Selenium Bootcamp
  • Ministry of Testing meetups
  • Selenium Conference
  • Free Selenium Tutorials
  • Why Begin Test Automation eBook
  • Selenium 101 Toolkit

Of course, this is a broad overview of what it takes to go from a manual to an automated tester, and there’s a lot more to actually learning automation than four steps. However, it’s likely that you’ll find the change worth it, both to heighten your career and enhance your abilities.

Filed Under: Test Automation Tagged With: automated testing, learning, manual testing

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