What is the best way to learn Selenium Webdriver or any Automation tool in general? [closed]

Question

I have purchased a Selenium automation course and practice sometimes as per the code shown in the lecture. But, i am going very slow and circling in basic topics like dropdowns, select tag, waits etc.

I am not able to start with Advance automation like integration of CI/CT tools, database automation etc?

Any tips on learning? Any shared experiences?

Answer 1

Same position as me. Starting as Testmanager and shifted to Test Engineer I was having troubles to understand how test automation worked. For the beginning I would not start with mobile testing. Testing with Websites is more convenient.

What helped in my case:

• Understand how the DOM structure works esp. locators (xpath, css, id, etc.)
• After you got a clear understanding how it works, use tools e.g. Selenium IDE. At the beginning I would not use that until you got a understanding how the locators are "working"
• In case that in your company is a consultant (e.g. service provider) try to adapt his skills (in my case it helped, one person explained me the structure of DOM differences between xpath ID, css etc...) and gave me a lot of tips about Selenium
• Use easy online tutorials step by step..

Tutorials which helped in my case:

Angie Jones Free Courses

Free Selenium Tutorial

Beginners Guide

Answer 2

Automate an dummy application end to end testing

"A journey of thousand steps starts with an single step" - Lao Tzu

I would suggest to take an real/ or dummy fully working application and automate full end to end test cases but take baby steps each day consistently for few months .

Deliberately introduce few bugs in the application , to make sure automation is catching them and reporting them.

Once this done , try integrating it with CI/ CD process to make sure it is fully automated.

In my view, secret to learn anything is simply just to hands on practice it.

Answer 3

Automated testing requires more discipline compared to manual, Learning automation is not difficult but it requires a focused and planned approach. First, you need to know one programming language preferably Java or C# & You need to know about following.

• Selenium Webdriver API.
• Apache POI API for reading and writing data to excel.
• Log4j logging Utility for logging purpose.
• IDE : Preferably Eclipse or Intellij.
• Version Control: Preferably GIT or SVN.
• Testing Framework: Preferably TestNG or JUnit.
• CI Tool: Jenkins.
• Build Tools: ANT and Maven.
• Knowledge of Frameworks: KeywordDriven, DataDriven and Hybrid.

Answer 4

The best way to prioritize elements of learning (what to learn first, which part of a complex issue to understand first) is by actually doing something useful with it. That is the way the brain learns the best (engineering problems come first and the abstract theory comes later to explain all of the elements in a high-view manner).

Therefore, you will advance the quickest if you have a concrete problem you are working on. So, either try building some test framework for a project of yours or start working on an open-source project or something similar (as others have suggested in this thread).