How to switch from Manual Test Engineer to Automation Test Engineer?

“Moving your career from manual to automation testing is neither an easy task nor a difficult task. It completely depends on your attitude of learning something new.”

You already know how to do Software Testing to ensure Software Quality and you also have domain knowledge. So don’t be afraid that you’ll have to start from scratch. In fact, you are ahead of the game.

Learn Programming language

Pick an object-oriented programming language and try to learn and clear you fundamental skills

This is because to kick start the journey of automation test engineer, object oriented concepts should be clear .Ypu can pck any programming language e.g JAVA, C#, Groovy etc . Java is trending in the market.

Don't worry if you don't have Programming knowledge

As a manual tester, you don’t have to worry if you don’t know a programming language, as several tools these days have scriptless test automation tools, which means that anybody can automate without the need to code even a single line.

These tools basically mimic and record the user actions step by step, and then automatically build test scripts.

Choose The Right Automation Tool

Check if the tool that you plan to use meets your testing needs. There are specialized testing tools as per the type of testing. For example:

• In case you are required to test APIs for your product, there are specialized API testing tools, like PostMan.

• In case you want to test the performance of the product, you can use specialized performance testing tools like Apache JMeter or LoadNinja.

• In case you need to run browser compatibility tests, you could rely on browser testing tools like BrowserStack or LambdaTest.

• In case you want to perform web application testing, you could rely on tools like Selenium WebDriver.

Conclusion :

No doubt that career pivots are difficult and scary. But fortunately, transitioning from Manual Testing to Automation Engineer should not be among the hardest ones. There are lots of tools in the market for automation but the real question is which one to choose. As per my experience, I would like to suggest you to first learn Selenium and try to automate web-based application as well as db .This is because its trending in the market currently and will help you a lot to kick-start your automation journey .Once you learnt the automation tools try to create the framework based on your knowledge . Good luck and Happy Testing !