How to become a Test Automation Engineer? Myths, Strategy & Plan

Test automation has seen great growth. Test automation engineers are a highly sought-after skill across industries, which makes it difficult to stay competitive.

This blog is for you if you want to grow as a manual tester, or just want to learn more about the automation tester career path.

Who is an Automation Tester?

Automation testers are individuals who use automated test scripts to execute testing initiatives. In order to minimize bug escapes and release on time, they design, write, maintain, and execute automated test scripts throughout the Software Testing Life Cycle.

Organizations employ quality assurance teams to achieve the following objectives:

Work and interact with clients, product managers, developers, business analysts, and IT personnel across the team.
Establish procedures to look at requirements and make test plans, strategies, documents, a roadmap, and spending budgets.
You can do shift left and be involved earlier in the product development stages to better understand the codebase, architecture, and coding conventions.
Integrate testing tools into existing tool chains and technologies.

A good tester should know more about software testing in general. A deeper understanding of programming and technical aspects will enhance your ability to develop more advanced test scripts and cover more critical scenarios.

Myths about Automation Testing: Is it a good career?

Testing will always be needed to make sure software is fully functional as long as it exists.

According to a report from Markets and Markets, the global market size was valued at USD 24.7 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach USD 52.7 billion by 2027, representing a CAGR of 16.4% during the forecast period.

But there are a lot of things that people think of automation testers. Here are a few statements we think are common.

Automation Tester Myth #1: Developers Are Better than Automation Testers

Software engineers or developers make more money than testers. This argument isn’t fair because it doesn’t take away from the role of an automation tester.

It’s like choosing between a job that pays well, but you hate, or a job that pays less, but you love every minute of it.

Automation Tester Myth #2: There isn’t much to software testing.

The application code has been built, but it now needs to consider different ways in which the code will not do what it is supposed to do. It’s a lot of learning to make sure that issues don’t go unnoticed after the code goes to production. The user interface, business interface, and backend layer must be effectively integrated and communicate effectively with each other.

Test automation engineers will encounter a variety of technologies on a daily basis.

Testing IDE
You can set up an automatically-triggered suite of tests to fire up whenever a build is ready to be tested
Log issues and bug tickets on platforms like Jira.

Automation Tester Myth #3: Testers are usually not good at coding.

If you want to own the test environments, you must be comfortable with the technology stack. Testers often think that they don’t like to code, but times have changed, and test automation engineers are finding and fixing issues by themselves.

Automation testing requires experience writing scripts in several languages, including Java, Perl, Ruby, and many more.
Testers use SQL queries to create or test data for ETL testing or data validation.
Additionally, testers assist in the migration of written code from one database to another.

The detrimental impact of poorly written code on your testing abilities is undeniable.

An automation tester can write scripts to maintain, monitor, and prepare test environments. Having a good understanding of coding makes it easier to know what would make the code more testable.

What do Automation Testers Do?

Testing is just a set of tasks that testers have to do with automation tools, but there is more to it than that. What companies expect from you will heavily depend on their business requirements. They are looking for testers who are capable of thinking critically, finding flaws and contradictions, using different tools, and using concrete testing techniques for well-implemented test automations.

Since organizations in different industries want to make their testing process faster through automation and make software or product releases faster, they are always looking for testers who know how to use cutting-edge technologies for software testing.

A thorough understanding of the application domain and software testing principles is essential.
The development of automation frameworks and test scenarios requires enhanced technical and programming proficiency.
It’s important to set goals and choose test cases that meet those goals.
It is essential to automate several repetitive test tasks, such as report comparisons or extracting data from Excel sheets, to save the entire QA team time.
Interact with your team to discuss ways to improve the testing process.

How to Become a Test Automation Engineer?

To become a test automation engineer, you will need to have a solid foundation in programming concepts. You will need to understand how software testing works and how to write code. The testing job requires you to know more about the whole software development process.

Being well-versed in manual testing is an added advantage when developing automation test scenarios. If you are looking to move from manual testing to test automation, you should check out these five simple steps.