A Story of a Veteran Manual Tester’s Learning Test Automation from a Coach: “One Question per Day”

Learning E2E Test Automation Can be Simpler than Most Think.

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Bruce, an experienced manual tester in his late 50s, crossed paths with me at a large tech company. Hearing my accomplishments in test automation, he approached the head of testing practices to learn from me. Meanwhile, I was already engaged in two projects then, which raised concerns among my managers when the testing lead relayed Bruce’s proposition. So, there were some conversations among the testing lead, my project managers and Bruce. In the end, the agreement was “Bruce can only ask Zhimin for helping one test automation problem each day”.

This is quite different from how I conduct test automation coaching, I found this idea intriguing too. Frankly, I initially perceived Bruce’s interest as more of an experimental endeavour than a serious commitment. However, this actually worked quite well. I share my experience and thoughts here, in case this might help some motivated QA engineers who are determined to learn E2E Test Automation.

First Day

Prior to commencing, knowing his limited access time with me, Bruce self-studied my book: “Practical Web Test Automation with Selenium WebDriver”.

The first day, of course, is setting up the test execution environment on Bruce’s machine and running a sample test (that came with TestWise IDE), which only took a few minutes. Then, I created a new test project for Bruce, and with his provided info, wrote a simple login test.

See driving the app in Chrome, only after a few minutes of work, Bruce showed great interest.

Nearly Every day onwards

Then, pretty much every day onwards, he came up (I was working at one level above) for me, “Zhimin, when you are free, can you come down and help me?”. I usually just went with him and finished solving his problem in under 2 minutes.

A Success

A few months later, Bruce was considered by his manager a competent test automation engineer. He managed to keep running his suite (> 50 tests) for a few years. He told me that there was pressure from new managers to ask to change the test automation framework, tool or language. His answer was, “Come and I will show you the execution of my current suite (raw Selenium WebDriver + RSpec, using TestWise IDE as the tool). If the new framework/tool achieves the same, I am happy to change”. Then, his managers (notice, plural) left him alone.

Why Did it work?