How to manage to learn Selenium, Jmeter on your own so that you could use it to your best knowledge on your new automation role

Question

I arrived UK this august and was looking for jobs here into functional testing, but i have been called for an role which has functional testing, automation testing(Selenium), Performance Testing(J Meter)!

Now the challenge here is that i am only equipped with functional testing. I have told them in the telephonic round about this thing that i am not hands on with automation and performance testing. In this case the interviewer told me that he will still call me for a face to face round but he expects me to tell them what strategy i will be having for automation testing and performance testing.

In this role They expect me to be the only tester(First Tester in the team ) doing manual,automation and performance, so i cannot depend on any other tester to learn automation/performance.

My Question here is that how do i prepare myself for the interview, In this case i am willing to learn automation so that i can use it in my job later, but in 1 week how do i learn at least the basics or maybe learn at least enough to convince them about myself,

Can you please suggest me any links to learn automation/performance, or any strategy to go about this situation.

Answer 1

I am in no way trying to be rude, but I think the hiring team may be setting themselves up for failure. Having worked on many many automation projects and worked with many people of varying skill levels, it is actually just about impossible for someone with no automation background to jump in to automation and get it right the first time. With no guidance or mentoring from someone more senior who has done it before, you will be left to figure things out, which I am sure you will be able to do... over the course of many years. In the meantime, you may get some automation up and running and it will likely add value, but may have any number of problems like being un-maintainable, unreliable, or not really validating what you want it to validate or what is important to validate.

If it were my decision as a hiring manager, I would absolutely make sure the first person I brought in had prior experience writing automation.

With all of that said, this very well could be a great learning opportunity for you, and here are some answers that may help on the Selenium side:

Good resources/tutorials/tips for beginner doing automation?

Manual tester wanting to get into automation

Your suggestions for writing reliable Web UI automation

For JMeter, honestly you can figure out how to use the tool by looking through documentation and examples, but the far more important thing for performance testing is understanding HTTP inside and out. You need to understand how app servers like IIS and Tomcat work, you need to understand the architecture of your applications and know how they interact, and know what to monitor while executing your load tests. You need to know what requests are important to validate, vs what you can fire and forget.

Here are a couple of links that may also be useful for performance testing with jmeter: http://jmeter.apache.org/usermanual/intro.html

https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/functional-testing-jmeter

How to determine breaking point of my application when performance testing from jMeter

Best of luck.

Answer 2

The right way to go about it would be to prepare not just for the interview but for the job itself.

1. Do you have hands on experience in programming?
2. Try learning java. Both, selenium and jmeter work on java. So learn the concepts.
3. Once you learn java, google tutorials for selenium and java. Learn from them.
4. Ask help from the testing community for one on one lessons.
5. Get some practice and then improvise.

As far as the interview in short time is concerned, show them that even though you don't have knowledge of those tools, but with some guidance and practice you would learn them soon... :)

Answer 3

As the very first step I would recommend exploring basic functionality of the tools. Luckily both Selenium and JMeter provide record-and-replay functionality so to start:

1. Selenium IDE - Firefox Plugin which is able to record test flaw and generate relevant code. Preferred language is Java as both tools are Java-based and you'll be able to integrate it into an unified test harness more easy.

2. JMeter's HTTP(S) Test Script recorder can convert site browsing into JMeter's .jmx file. See the following links for reference:

   • JMeter Proxy Step by Step
   • JMeter's Superpower: The HTTP Proxy Server

Once you have projects skeletons you can begin enhancing them by adding correlation logic, assertions, external data, etc.

There is no rocket science, both tools can be used initially by a person with no or minimal experience, both are free and open source and there is a lot of information over the web.