How Can I Enhance/Improve My Selenium Skills?
Two months ago, when it was just six months in automation using Selenium and then I had a question - how can I enhance/improve my selenium skills? In this post, I am trying to answer my question.
You might think, why do I think that I have eligibility to answer this question? OK, here is the story- it’s been just eight months that I have started with Selenium and I got an amazing opportunity to explore all aspects of Selenium and related tools- like Selenium WebDriver API for Web-App automation, Selenium Grid for test distribution, TestNG for controlling test flow, Extent Reporting for awesome test results, Appium for mobile automation, AutoIT & Sikuli for handling native OS control opened from browsers (Browse window for file upload) & bit of Maven for dependency management & test suite invocation. I have even designed two automation frameworks for two different products.
As I worked on the whole set of tools in six months, I was exposed to very high learning curve in early phase and later I found out my learning curve is going stagnant so I have to make an effort to keep enhancing my skills. Below are the list of the things which I did and doing and benefited on my quest to enhance/improve selenium skills:-
- Blog.
- SO
- Selenium Users - Google Groups
- Selenium Test Automation User Group
- Follow Leaders
Blog about Selenium:-
If you need to sharpen your technical skills, you should try to write about it more often. This has helped me a lot. This is one of the reasons why I post. Basically writing any post needs research and you also need to articulate the thoughts in a way so that it makes sense to others. If you learn something new today, write about it. Writing about any topic be it Selenium or any other, you need to have an understanding of that topic and then you have to develop the ability to make it simpler for others. Writing helps us to recall our learning curve and that sort of thing stick with a mind for a very long time.
Stackoverflow.com[SO]:-
If you can spare some time every day and wanted to utilize your knowledge to help someone, you can always turned up to Stackoverflow without hesitation. What is stackoverflow?
“A language-independent collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers.”
You can follow tags like Selenium, Selenium-WebDriver and testng, so that you will find related questions easily.
Selenium Users - Google Groups:-
This is just like any other google group where users seek product related help. Lots of guys do answer to posted questions. If you want to know what kind of issues are others in community are running into, you can subscribe for summary email. One of the advantages to be active in such community is finding different approaches for same issue which of course helps to build better perspective for automation.
Selenium Test Automation User Group:-
This is Linkedin group for selenium related queries, it also does help user with the same way that Google Group does. But this is not an official group of Selenium.
Follow Leaders:-
Follow who are doing great in Selenium and their posts/answers can take you to the next level. Few suggestions from me:
P.S. You should also keep an eye on job postings even if you are not looking for a job actively. Job Descriptions gives an idea about how tools and strategrgies are used across the indursty and what is new shiny thing we should know about. Recently, came across informative post from Topatl about hiring selenium developer please go through it.
This is all for now.
Cheers!!