AUTOMATION TESTING - A MOST GROWING CAREER IN IT INDUSTRY

I am writing this article to brief better understanding about Automation Testing career in IT/Software Industry. In these days there is very good opportunity as well as growth in this career within whole industry.

I know most of fresh graduates want to establish their career as Software Developer in industry but this is because they don't know more about other available opportunity within the industry. Apart from Software Development there are lot of other career opportunities available within the industry, Software Testing is one of them.

Automation Testing is an automated way to perform software testing. Automation can be done for all types of testing i.e. Functional, Usability, Sanity, Smoke, etc. The career of automation testing is growing day by day not because of it is reducing the human effort. It is growing day by day because of its demands and why it is in demand? Because it allows the tester to do more stuff while automation is performing all predefined tests.

To start a career in automation testing the first thing which need to decide is tool, which automation tool is good to learn or which is better for industry/company purpose?

To support automation there are lot of tools available in market some of them are commercial and some of them are open source. Commercial means you have to pay if you are going to use those tool and Open Source means no payment required to use these tools. Popular automation tools are Test Complete, UFT (Formaly knows as QTP), RFT, Ranorex, Sahi, AutoIt, Selenium, Robotium, etc.

If you are still confused to decide between commercial & open source then leave your confusion to side of the topic because tool selection is completely depend upon your current skill set and how are you going to enhance your skill for automation tool. Skill set is programming skills. If you are going to use open source tool then you must require to learn or utilize good programming skill but if you are going to use commercial tool there is less programming compare to open source tool. So you can decide the option as per your current programming skill or are you ready enhance your programming skill?

All tools are supporting one or more from the popular programming languages i.e. Java, C#, VBScript, JavaScript, Ruby, Groovy, Python, PHP, etc. Now you have to decide in which programming language you want to start automation scripting. Once language is get finalized it is very easy to finalize the tool. You have to consider a thing before finalize the programming language, you must choose that language which is familiar to you or you already have understanding about that.

Database knowledge is also important for automation testing. You must have a doubt in your mind, why database? It is just because to store your test data. Most of the companies and automation tester are using Excel for this purpose but now the tradition has been changed and they are also moving to database storage for test data storage. You can choose any of DB with it supporting language i.e. MS SQL, MySQL, SQL Lite, MongoDB, etc.

Apart from tool, programming language, test data, storage, database there is one more thing which plays a important role in automation testing career is testing concepts/methodologies. These are required because if you have no idea about testing concepts/methodologies then how you can say that the automation script is written by you have all test coverage.

In most of the company automation tester are working on the test data/cases written by manual testers but where exploratory testing or ad-hoc testing has an important role in testing, there is very less chance to availability of test data/cases. So it most important to have understanding of Testing concepts/methodologies.

At last, to build a better career in automation testing you must have following:
1. Good understanding of Testing concepts/methodologies.
2. Knowledge of a programming language.
3. Tool selection based on programming skill.
4. Knowledge of Database.