“Hey, I am starting out as a Tester, how can I start learning Selenium ?”

Is the most common question newbie Grad Testers or relatively inexperienced Testers , who aspire to head down the “technical tester” “automator” path , ask. This is a question that I asked as well early on in my career with minimal context around some of the core concepts of taking an automated approach to Testing.

My endeavor as a mentor/coach now is to obviously not to combat this question directly 🙂 , and rather get my mentees/coachees to self-reflect on another set of questions so that they….

• Focus first on understanding and practicing  their core Testing capabilities ( agnostic of  a tool set )
• Understand the limitations, cost vs benefits of Automation
• Do not undermine the analytical,system thinking and sapient skills that are required to deliver effective and valuable Test Automation solutions

I have put together a list of FAQs (as a mindmap below) that each Tester must reflect on and learn before heading down the path of becoming a Test Tooling/Automation expert.

My coaching philosophy is that one must first understand how and what to test before learning what to test with ?

P.S. – The mindmap is best viewed by saving the file locally and zooming in , thank you 🙂