Practical Advice for Hiring a Junior Test Automation Engineer. Part 2: Advice*

Advice for both hiring managers and job seekers.

In this “Practical Advice for Hiring a Junior Test Automation Engineer” series:

• Part 1: The Facts

• Part 2: Advice *

• Part 3: Why?

• Part 4: FAQ*

Practical Advice

Find candidates with these two main general attributes: being Honest and Passionate, then train them by an external real test automation coach.

1. Honest

For the terms “Testing” or “Quality Assurance”, most people will associate a high degree of honesty required for the job, right? Dishonesty, unfortunately, is very common in test automation. Here, I will quickly list a few examples.

• A fake automated tester claimed, “he did X hundreds of automated tests for SharePoint using Cypress”. I showed him the Cypress official doc, “not supporting frames”, but nearly every SharePoint page uses frames intensively (multi-level). He was silent.

• IBM Rational Functional Tester, the recommended test automation tool by the Gardner Report 2013, its test script did not even work in a dual-screen setup, which is common in workplaces. (By the way, the bug seems still unresolved today. Anyway, this tool has long been forgotten)

• While nearly all software projects claim doing Agile, have you seen a single case of running automated end-to-end regression testing daily (which is considered the foundation of Agile and DevOps)?

2. Passionate

Passion is essential for any job, but it’s absolutely critical in software testing. Maintaining a large regression suite of 200+ tests is demanding and often underappreciated work. Without real passion, people tend to just tweak scripts until they pass instead of digging in to uncover the true root cause.

3. Getting a real Test Automation Coach is quick and cost-effective