How to become an automation tester with no coding experience

Now a days automation is becoming a mandatory skill for those who are working in testing team. As the competition is increasing, manual testers are finding a way to learn automation testing. But very few are successful in becoming a good automation tester. In today's post I will discuss about how to begin your journey to become a good automation tester with no coding knowledge.

Automation mindset makes you think every task you do from the perspective of automation. It makes you think how automation can make some of your difficult and repetitive task easy using automation. It's not that easy to gain such mindset at the first, but as you gain experience, you will become more and more expert in this. Lets see how to gain such mindset.

The very fist thing you should learn to become a successful automation engineer is HTML. Even though you are not into web automation, still having a good understanding of HTML will give you a good perception of how data is presented with different elements or structure. You don't have to master HTML but you should know each and every element and what is the use of it, how it is used to present the data. You should also need to understand how multiple HTML elements for a block of code to show things differently.

This will help you a lot when you work with complex application specifically web or mobile based applications to identify the elements or to find the alternate solution for a difficult scenario.

There are several tools available for automation. To get started, selenium is the best choice. This will be little difficult for those who are from non-coding background, but this will give you a strong foundation. There are so many free tutorials available for selenium. You can also go through their official website www.selenium.dev. If you are learning from their official website, you may see many programing language support for selenium, but for now don't jump into the programing language, rather understand what selenium and how it is functioning.

Once you are done with the first round of selenium review or tutorials you may have a fair understanding of the programing language which is used. Choose the most comfortable programing language or the one which is used by your organization. You don't have to master the programing language or selenium at this point. You need to know basics right now. At least you should be good with the following concepts.

You can get started with at least basic understanding of above concepts, as you progress through your journey, you can develop strong knowledge of these concept and beyond. This is for those who just wanted to get stared.

Yes, practice make you perfect. The most important thing is practice. You might get frustrated at the beginning, but you need to find solutions for the same through online community. Trust me no trainer can give you 100% knowledge, they can only give you direction. The one who is successful is the one who finds his own path. You need to practice every method, every locator and every type of elements as much as you can to make yourself a strong automation engineer.

To practice you may use your own project or any demo websites available online. You can also use our demo website for practice. It has different flavors of elements and scenarios to cover all automation concepts.

Repeat the steps 1 to 5. Yes, you need to revisit all the steps again and again until you feel confident that you need to move to next level. Once you are confident, you will find your own path. But this is just a beginning to know how to start an automation engineer journey. There are many more things an automation engineer should know, eg. Unit Testing Framework, BDD, CI CD etc. But as a beginner, you should only focus on these 5 things to make a strong foundation. Rest of other technologies can be learned later as if you start with any of this will limit your basic understanding and will confuse you a lot.