Just in time for new year resolutions coming up the corner in a month, you may think about positive changes to make in your life. Like losing weight, starting to exercise, meditating, spending more time in nature, sleeping more, speaking with your friends in real life instead of chatting with them on Facebook. If any of these are really important to you, it is never too late to start doing it.
It is never too late to improve your life, especially in areas that matter. So start right away ๐
The same applies to any skill that may benefit your test automation career, such as Selenium WebDriver. If learning it is important to you, it is never too late to start doing it.
But is this skill still required by the market?
You may be under the impression that every tester knows Selenium and can do web test automation, so why bother if everyone already knows it? How would learning it makes you different from everyone else out in the job market?
Well, it is only partially true that every tester knows Selenium. Most manual testers know of Selenium (what it is, what it does, what you can do with it) without knowing how to use Selenium properly. Or if they do know how to use it, it’s at a very basic level which means building test scripts with hundreds of lines of code that are hard to change, are not stable and fail frequently, and are difficult to maintain or understand.
Test automation of any kind, including the one for websites apps, is not about using a simple tool but rather a stack of technologies. The most important of these technologies is the programming languages (C#, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby), followed by a unit testing framework (nUnit, jUnit, TestNG, Mocha), an IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse, IntelliJ), languages for finding elements (XPATH, CSS), and only then an automation framework. With TestProject – You have it all bundled up in a single free solution which I would recommend checking out to ease out your way of starting your new learning path to Selenium.
Then going back – Yes, many manual testers know of Selenium but few use it properly.
The ones that do, are moving slowly but surely to development. They will become sooner or later SDETs or software developer engineer in test which is basically a developer. Good developers are rare, good SDETs are rare as well and always high in demand.
Therefore, this is what your goal should be – To learn Selenium in 2020 and become an SDET. A very good one ๐
It is never too late for this.