Learning to automate in 2026 - where would you start?

Discussions
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1

I’m looking to get some experienced manual testers up to speed with automation, nominally Playwright but fundamentals as important as anything else.

I know AI can handle a lot of this, but I obviously like the idea of our humans in the loop knowing how to do this stuff!

Where would you point people for the most efficient and relevant start in automated testing, in 2026? Courses, videos, sites… whatever you think is best in class?

2

I’ll start here :slight_smile: Roadmap To Becoming A Test Automation Engineer | MoTaverse

3

Started from 0 with opening a cypress project in a company repo.

Used their recording studio to create cy.js files over the tests I was manually performing.
Studied the structure of the tests.
Then learned about JavaScript to continue with it by writing it myself.

Started requesting the dev team to create selectors where needed.
It led the team to get interest in what I was doing.
One of the developers offered to help and switched the entire project to TypeScript.
Studied TS at this step.

Now we have a fully automated commit-triggered regression test suite !

4

I also started by learning javascript. I wrote this: https://testandanalysis.home.blog/2022/01/18/learning-javascript-is-helping-me-to-test/, which has got some links in it that I hope help.

5

I found these courses quite good for the start: Test Automation University | Applitools

6

We’ve got a few Insights on the topic and have some more automation specific ones. We also have test automation certs. We also have and continue to run AI + automation themed Masterclasses that are worth keeping an eye out on.

7

With AI becoming more prevelalent, I wonder whether it would be advantageous to get people new to coding to focus on getting the best from those tools than traditional scripting?

8

You could create a course using one of the AI tools. For example I asked ChatGPT to create a two hours automation course using playwright and JavaScript. It created a course and it easy to follow through

9
  1. Pick a programming language - Java/Python /Javascript / C#
  2. Pick a tool - Selenium / Playwright /Cypress
  3. Decide what you want to automate - UI/ Mobile Application / API
  4. Pick a platform - Udemy /youtube/test automation university (Udemy has paid content but has structured content)
  5. Another alternative to YouTube or Udemy is MoT
  6. Start with fundamentals (1 Week is enough) - because in the starting upto OOPS is required for automation in any language
  7. Then you can start with any unit testing framework like TestNG/Pytest
  8. Then, subsequently, you can move to BDD frameworks like Behave, etc.

However, apart from video tutorials, official documentation is really useful in the long run as it is always updated as per the latest content.

While starting with any programming language you can use this website for proper roadmap of the topics that you want to learn,.

Also you can take help from llm from chatgpt or claude to help you in any topic or program if you are stuck.