3 Ways To Learn Test Automation
My top free picks for learning test automation at any technical skill level.
In the world of YouTube, Pluralsight, Coursera, e-books, and Meetup groups, pinpointing a starting point for learning test automation can be overwhelming to say the least. There’s a tool for every tech stack, an entire world in UI automation alone, throw in web service automation, unit testing, contract testing, visual testing… you’ve got yourself a pile of e-learnings that’ll collect virtual dust as fast as a well-intentioned physical bookshelf (I really thought I’d get through more of those during peak pandemic time…). In an attempt to filter out some noise, here are my three selections of free online resources that will enable anyone to get started with test automation.
Postman Learning Center
Postman is an amazing tool for developing and testing APIs. I have never worked on a team that hasn’t used it. It’s extremely powerful and intuitive to use for manual API testing, and with literally two clicks, anyone can start adding automated tests to their API requests. In my opinion, this is the easiest and fastest way to get exposed to automated API testing.
Follow their step-by-step Getting Started guide, followed by their Writing Scripts guide.
Test Automation University
Test Automation U offers exceptional trainings for a wide variety of test automation concepts and tools. There is nowhere else that you can find trainings of this caliber, created by industry pros like Angie Jones. You can’t go wrong with any of their learning paths!
Cypress Docs
Technically this isn’t a designated learning resource, and rather is the documentation site for Cypress — arguably the most newly-popular, “every-SDET-job-description-now-uses-this-as-a-buzzword” automation tool. Rightfully so, if you ask me. Cypress’s documentation is superb and they make setting up a UI and API automation framework awesomely easy (and fun!).
Start here to install Cypress, then follow their docs on writing your first test. Video tutorial included!
Test Automation U also has an Intro to Cypress course!
