# Getting back into automation after a few years, what's new?

**URL:** <https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/getting-back-into-automation-after-a-few-years-whats-new/72381>\
**Category:** Discussions\
**Tags:** tools, automation\
**Created:** [30 November 2023 08:49 UTC](https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/getting-back-into-automation-after-a-few-years-whats-new/72381 "2023-11-30T08:49:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![simonnorris](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e5b9ba/32.png) [@simonnorris](https://club.ministryoftesting.com/u/simonnorris)\
**Post date:** [30 November 2023 08:49 UTC](https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/getting-back-into-automation-after-a-few-years-whats-new/72381/1 "2023-11-30T08:49:52Z")

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Good morning fellow testers, I’m currently between jobs and I’m looking for new opportunities. I’ve been performance testing now for more than 20 years, but alongside that I’ve made sure my automation skills have been maintained. After all, the two often complement each other.

I’m now tempted to look at full automation jobs, and I’m wondering what I should be looking for as a refresher? As a guide, my last full automation role was 6 years ago, where I used Protractor to test an Angular based UI. For that role I stuck with what I know, so it was a page object model within a BDD framework. Are POM’s still a ‘thing’ or are there better ways to do test automation on a UI?

What are the current ‘favoured’ tools? Is Selenium still near the top?

In the same role we also used a C# based tool to test API calls, it was entirely the wrong tool given the skillsets available in the team so I’d prefer not to try and work on that again. What would be a better API tool nowadays?

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**Author:** ![willyjamesfold](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/f0a364/32.png) [@willyjamesfold](https://club.ministryoftesting.com/u/willyjamesfold)\
**Post date:** [30 November 2023 09:53 UTC](https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/getting-back-into-automation-after-a-few-years-whats-new/72381/2 "2023-11-30T09:53:40Z")

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Favoured tools, at least in terms of job ad requirements, seem to be Cypress, Playwright and Selenium Webdriver.

API discussion here -

> [@What's your go to API testing tool](https://club.ministryoftesting.com/t/whats-your-go-to-api-testing-tool/70481/2):
>
> I imagine this too! So… my choices are: Postman or Burpsuite! Postman is just so nice due to the quick and easy UI to do exploratory testing on APIs. Most of the time I start on a project, developers are already using Postman, so it’s not only easy to use for them but easy to collab between developers & testers. I use Burpsuite more often to easily alter/add headers, run wordlists, the intruder and test for race conditions. They also offer a lot of plugins that can be used in testing APIs, s…