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What Does it Take to Become a Real E2E Test Automation Engineer? Part 1-C: Broad Knowledge
Technical Perspective Reasons why real E2E test automation engineers are so rare?
Part 1: Broad Knowledge 1-A, 1-B, 1-C.
Part 2: Willingness to Learn.
Continue from Part A and Part B.
Table of Contents:
∘ 10. Continuous Testing
∘ 11. Regular Expression
∘ 12. Misc Skills
∘ 13. Highly Efficient using keyboard shortcuts
∘ 14. Advanced Software Design
· When lacking some knowledge, …
· Don’t feel intimidated.
10. Continuous Testing
You have seen that “CI/CD” is often included in the selection criteria in Job Ads for test automation engineers. But in fact, it is Continuous Testing for Executing E2E tests. Very few people have exposure to Continuous Testing, which is far more challenging than CI/CD for obvious reasons: E2E Tests are more brittle (prone to changes) than Unit/Integration Tests (in CI), and their execution time is much longer.
For more Continuous Testing knowledge, check out my book, Practical Continuous Testing: make Agile/DevOps real.
11. Regular Expression
I have seen many Software Engineers and Automated Testers writing long, complex code to parse or extract data from text, such as using StringTokenizer in Java. A much better (and proven) approach is to use Regular Expression.
A regular expression is a pattern that the regular expression engine attempts to match in input text. Most programming languages, if not all, have built-in support for Regular expression.
Check out my article, “Use Regular Expressions in Test Automation”.
12. Misc Skills
- Use or write utilities to Generate test data
e.g., generate a fixed-size file, say 10MB file, to test file upload. - Templating to generate dynamic content
Especially useful for API testing. See this article for an example.
