Before you say this is a redundant question because the club and MoT content and certificates are awesome (and who am I to disagree), we know there are good things out there. Such as;
But what have you found?
What are your go-to spaces, sites or resources to help you with learning automation?
Share with the community and help everyone grow, thank you
One thing I do find is āPaid coursesā tend to go stale quickly due to the constant moving trends, and of course they have an ROI to think about.
So, as well as the MOT Forums, I tend to go to the following:
Pluralsight - because it is paid for by my company, remember my note on stale thoā¦
YouTube - A ton of information out there, from those who want to make a little cash, so they keep it up to date. Many channels are dedicated to Test and QA content also.
Tool-specific sites - Postman, Playwright - we have fully engaged with these now, and it is a constant learning path.
Tutorials are great but sometimes what I really need is to see what other people are doing who are working in the same space. For me, when it comes to Automation, it means following the people who are using the same tools I am. Since I work with Cypress, I follow Filip Hric - https://filiphric.com/ and Gleb Bahmutov - https://glebbahmutov.com/ They write about automation in a way that I understand and helps me follow better practices.
Not sure whether your question is about learning resources, or more general reference material?
I donāt really have fixed or go-to sources for stuff on test automation. But Iām subscribed to different testing and programming newsletters, and I bookmark articles that I find particularly useful. I really like Daniel Mokaās newsletters, because theyāre usually pretty easy to digest, and I like the way he structures them.
I learn best by doing, and so having something real to work on leads me to many sources of information - both people I actually know, and stuff online. Iāve actually found ChatGPT to be a good sparring partner, as long as you treat it as more of an inaccurate starting point than a source in its own right.
There are so many ways of doing things, and things to consider. I like casting a wide net and deliberately choosing which path to follow on a particular occasion, and try to know enough about a couple of different options so that I can remember it might be useful in future, and look into it more then.
As someone who has really enjoyed being jack-of-all-trades across my QA career, I find the hardest spots to find inspiration are in Legacy applications, in Mobile and around Embedded. Almost nothing in the dialog around web applications, cloud services interests me much. The online apps spaces are cluttered with a spread of tutorials, blogs and forum questions of such varying quality, that the MOT is a brilliant place to ask pointers on all things Web, Java and cloud.
For all of the embedded questions, Iām very often relying on just one lone blogger, one github repo or my own teamās skill at exploring. Recently I found a brilliant set of explainers for advanced use of the Python Pytest framework. https://pytest-with-eric.com/ by Eric de Andrade.
@utchbe ās https://playwrightsolutions.com/ is a great resource, as are his LinkedIn Learning courses. I did the first one already and am doing the second one currently.
Excellent question! You are very right, there is a ton of awesome content already out there, including MoT and the Club (both are great, no doubt). But it helps to hear what others are using as well!
Test Automation University, in my view, is a great resource. The courses are very well structured and taught by experts from the industry, making them ideal for beginners as well as seasoned testers.
Oh, and YouTube has some great content as well! Search for āsoftware testing automation tutorialsā and you will get many practical walkthroughs, tutorials for specific tools, and real-world project examples.
Apart from these, here are a few other sources I would recommend:
Ministry of Testing (of course) for articles, talks, and the community
Automation Testing subreddits ā discussions, tool comparisons, and real challenges
Blogs for Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright ā sharing latest features, best practices, and real use cases
Would love to hear what other resources people are using! Letās build a solid list of resources to support each other
In short, I donāt have a great go-to source for news as thereās so much activity but with MoT, LinkedIn and occasional events Iām āawareā of things. I then use MoT and company sites to learn more about a tool or technique that has my attention.
-ā
This has always been a real challenge for me as I struggle to follow too many sources. LinkedIn and Ministry of Testing are my two main sources of information but there is a lot of content every day so I will miss things and donāt have time to read everything. However what I do like about Ministry of Testing is that it has a great repository of information. I really like talks or videos as I often find this the easiest way to be engaged. Iāve read some blogs on automation and struggle to keep focusedā¦
Iāve benefited from MoT events or other testing meetups and you get to hear about other peopleās experiences and what they have used. Similarly listening to podcasts is also useful because people will mention the tools without it being a sales pitch or deep dive. This still lets me hear about different tools out there. Iāve always liked a community of practice or equivalent within a workplace to help share that knowledge.
When it comes to learning more about a specific tool or technique, I would likely look at Ministry of Testingās site and also go to the company that created the tool to see their resources and videos.
Codecademy has proven a great resource for helping people early in their test automation journey as a great way to begin learning the fundamentals of programming in their target language.
Similarly, CheckIO has been helpful, but I think this works better for people moving from another language to TypeScript or Python.
Back when I was first learning, https://demoqa.com/ also proved to be an invaluable resource for having somewhere to practice against!
One of the challenges here is defining ātest automation information.ā If you want info on how to do something specific in a specific tool, then besides AI there are plenty of resources, some of which have already been mentioned. But how about learning the trade of AiT? How do you become an actual professional besides doing it for many years? Some people mention such lessons and test automation strategy more than others, of course. But devs know the difference between ābuilding the product rightā and ābuilding the right product.ā And this is still hugely underappreciated in the automation space. So much attention for the technical stuff (so the former) and so little for significant business value of the automation. Sigh.
This monthās epic is a network performance bandwidth test. Test different devices and see what the max speed we get is and in different system configurations. Easy I thought, and so the rabbit hole widens.
It turns out that as we all know UDP is significantly faster over LAN (itās a lan-only use-case anyway, people with gigabit ethernet only are not being counted.) It also turns out that network cards can be teamed up, that network switches have backplanes that saturate, and that network cards actually can send data over more than one socket, faster, because cards now have multicore cpuās on the cards. All of which changes host cpu load. BTW the answer or tool for raw performance testing is either to use iperf3 (if on posix) or ntttcp GitHub - microsoft/ntttcp .
None of this I would have discovered without using reddit and the cpp_questions reddit among others.
