Marsha_R wrote:
UI Testing -
General testing knowledge - manual experience is good because you will still being doing it even with automation handy
General programming knowledge - need some experience with decisions, looping, error checking - doesn't matter what language
Customer interaction knowledge - support or sales or anything that put you in front of the customer so you can be their advocate here
Systems analysis - be able to create test cases from little information and be able to tell good documentation from bad
I like what you say about manual testing. One thing that too many test automaters get caught up in is simply writing the code and forgetting that they are actually writing TESTS. I have a couple of folks who take test cases written by someone else and just go through the actions... with no check points, if/then checks, etc. It just goes through the steps. I have to constantly remind them "This is a TEST. How do you know it passed?" and that an "object not found" error is not a good measure of pass/fail.
tristaanogre lol my interns do that - they are computer science students and they will automate anything I ask but writing a test case is still a foreign language even after a year of this
Marsha_R What I have found, many times, is that people are brought in as automation folks simply because they know how to click a record button. They have never written a test case before in their life, they don't know how to code in any code language, and they don't know much about the internal workings of computer software. Automated testing is a skilled task. It really is a cross discipline career. You need to be BOTH a developer AND a tester and have the mindsets of both. The creative, logical mind of a developer and the observer, particular detailed mind of a tester. And add a bit of deviousness in to REALLY be a good tester. Taking a raw college graduate/student and telling them "Here, go write an automated test" is not doing you or them any good.
tristaanogre I totally agree. My interns work on whatever tasks are available when they come to work. We've written manual tests together, most frequently they run existing manual tests, and in between, they add to our automation. They are most comfortable if I give them an existing test case and ask them to automate it. They absolutely hate writing down test cases from scratch but they are getting better at it. Near as I can tell, they get no exposure to testing in class other than helping each other debug code.
Perhaps to that end, based upon what Marsha_R has expressed, that there should be some training done before doing UI test automation. The people doing the automation need to know, first and formost, what it means to TEST an application. How are test cases written? How do you decide the test cases? How do you write them? What do you check for? etc. You really need to know how to test before you can really do a good job automating tests.
