What Does it Take to Become a Real E2E Test Automation Engineer? Part 1-B: Broad Knowledge

Technical Perspective Reasons why real E2E test automation engineers are so rare?

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Part 1: Broad Knowledge 1-A, 1-B, 1-C.
Part 2: Willingness to Learn.

Continue from Part A.

Table of Contents:
∘ 2. Shell Scripting
∘ 3. Version Control
∘ 4. SSH, FTP, SMTP protocols
∘ 5. Web knowledge
∘ 6. File Formats (constructing and parsing)
∘ 7. XPath
∘ 8. Comfortable with all major operating systems
∘ 9. SQL

2. Shell Scripting

Shell Scripting (Bash on Linux/macOS, Windows batch scripts or PowerShell), in essence, is automation.

Many years ago, I worked on a .NET project. There was a task to extract a column of data from one CSV file. One senior .NET contractor said, “Easy, I will write a .NET app, which allows to select an input CSV, then it does the extract and save to a file as user’s choice. This shouldn’t take me more than 1 hour.” Several other .NET developers nodded.

I was shocked to hear and see that because this is just one-line scripting.

For example, to extract the year column in the following CSV file.

The one-line script is:

 awk -F "\"*,\"*" '{print $2}' MySoftware.csv > output.txt

We often need to invoke shell scripts inside our E2E test scripts. Below is an example: invoke a shell script (kill_browser_and_driver_processes.sh) to clean up browser and driver processes before every build.

In BuildWise Agent’s Pre-Execution setting

3. Version Control