Automation …sounds like it would be easy to do and get started.  As live or Manual testers realize that automation can help them, the reality is that automation is not as easy as it could be.  This blog will help you justify the value of investing your time and energy automating your manual tests and a small recommended action plan to get started. 

Value for you and your organization 

So you are an awesome manual tester...why would you automate?  Doesn’t this put your job at risk and devalue your expertise?  Simply put, no. Automation is here to stay and the need for quality software and a good customer experience continues to be a business imperative.  How does a passionate tester embrace automation with demonstrable value to the organization? 

1. Scaling your quality expertise:  the ability to be a tester is unique and valuable.  However, manual testing isn’t necessarily the best way to help you or your organization. By automating your most mundane tests, it frees you up to do exploratory testing – a highly valuable and important function of the business.  It allows you to do more with your time and provide your development teams with much more complex and helpful testing outcomes 
2. Learning automation allows you to build out your skill sets making you that much more essential to the team, while also burnishing your development and testing resume for the future 
3. Running tests at scale allows you to test more parts of the software development lifecycle thereby delivering better experiences to your customers. As the digital transformation has accelerated for everyone – including your competitors – delivering a seamless and satisfying customer experience is more essential than ever.  

What it takes to automate 

Automation requires most of our testers to be able to create a few different things that all require that you have some coding under your belt.  Coding comes into play but with SmartBear AI–driven products you can get the best of both worlds: learn to code while using technology to help you get started.   

1. Using AI and record and playback you can see scripts created and learn from the proposed record and playback scripts.  SmartBear has several different approaches to record and playback and AI driven authoring.  You can find a few assets focused on getting started with BitBar. 
2. You will need to choose a language – I would recommend either Python or java.script.  Both are relatively easy to get started with and most software vendors support both languages robustly.   

Once you have gotten started, you will need to understand the rest of the testing process.  This blog series can help you do just that –  understanding what the various steps and components to getting are started beyond just your skills and some software tools. 

Stay tuned for upcoming blogs on all the steps you need to get started with automated testing, including tips on how to:  

• Define the application. UI, objects that you want to test  
• Select the right testing framework  
• Select an appropriate language for building your automation scripts and suites 
• Learn to code these (record and playback can be helpful here) 
• Select an automation platform (Selenium is popular) 
• Select a service or location to run your tests 

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