Story: A Former Mentee Failed Test Automation with Protractor

The price to pay for not following a proven winning formula.

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This is one of the Stories series.

Besides my own software apps, I have been implementing real test automation & Continuous Testing for a number of client projects by using the exact same formula. The test automation framework used is raw Selenium WebDriver in RSpec.

JavaScript has been the favourite language in recent years and is used in Protractor, TestCafe, Puppeteer, Cypress and Playwright. As a result, many automation testers (though some of them knew Ruby is better, including those whom I mentored) went for Javascript for more job opportunities or give in under the pressure. Here I have an interesting real story to share.

The Story

Many years ago, I took a tech lead role in a small start-up company for 3 months. Besides all the usual hands-on development /testing /DevOps tasks, I also mentored the team.

F was a final-year Uni student when I met him, who had already been there working as a part-time manual tester. I taught him automated testing, Ruby, using Git, Continuous Testing, and later, app development. He…