Training plans for SDET role

🙋 Questions
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I am currently a solo, primarily manual based, tester within a team of developers. I will soon be recruiting a graduate SDET with the intention they will help with automation and performance testing, as well as some manual testing.

My problem is how do I put together a training plan and provide the support and guidance expected, when I don’t have the experience myself?

Any advice gratefully welcome!

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Hello @no_coffee212
Congratulations on your team expansion! Transitioning can be a rewarding journey.
Here’s a suggested response-

  • Utilize online courses and familiarize yourself and new hires with automation basics
    Automation Testing

  • Encourage participation in the community, ask your queries and learn from other’s experiences.

  • Pair programming- Schedule regular sessions together, fostering knowledge and hands-on learning.

  • Create Documentation of your existing processes, methodologies, frameworks.

  • Feedback loop.

Additionally-

  1. /documentation/
  2. https://testautomation.applitools.com/
  3. https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/

You can also check out the community itself - https://www.ministryoftesting.com/

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Hi @no_coffee212

If you can build the training plan based on the person’s skills, I could suggest the following:

  1. Build basic programming skills.
  2. Develop a basic understanding of databases, networks, and operating systems.
  3. Focus on the most important aspect: problem-solving and how to approach problems.
  4. Gain insight into your domain.
  5. Introduce new technologies and guide the person on how to adopt them.
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If I understand this correctly, you are usure how to onboard an automation engineer when you are not experienced as an automation engineer? EDIT: derp. its 4AM and I still misread the OP about the experience level of the new engineer. I’ll let this stand anyways to show off my misunderstanding for one and all to jeer at :rofl:

Some thoughts:

  • There is a need for automation and that is why this person is being hired. Thus there is a problem to be solved by this person. “regression tests take too long” etc. So start by discussing the goals of the automation project. (probably wont be a big effort because the goals are usually pretty typical)

  • Automation developers like to work with familiar tools. Discuss the approach they intend to have in building the automation framework (Im assuming there is none) Include a development engineer you trust and work well with. Their role is to help express the products processes (build and delivery, tech stack, etc) The goal here is to design the automated testing as a feature of the product. So it should have a design, process, output, integration with the build process and deliverables. Having a dev engineer involved is useful because you want to address dev concerns with regard to usability, efficiency and information output - because you want developers to engage with the automated tests and find them useful. You dont want it to be “some other thing over there that the QA folks deal with when Im all done”

  • Once the project has been designed you can work do develop milestones and plan. Part of that plan will be to use your existing manual test suite as a backlog of tests to be automated. Note: automating a manual tests doesnt necessarily to “lift and shift” the case from beginning to end into a single automated case. Look for opportunities to break down the manual tests into more distinct automated tests.

  • For yourself, study automated test design patterns. Naming conventions, reporting standards, etc. I am sure many others will have more insights. (I tend to know more about what not to do! lol)