Must Know Resources for Test Automation Professionals

Web Sites/Blogs:

Learn the Basics

Software Testing Help – A software testing blog with in-depth tutorials on manual and automation testing.

Guru99 – A good learning resource with lots of free tutorial.

Tutorial Point – This site presents an opportunity to learn Software Testing starting from basic to advanced concepts.

Go beyond the Basics:

OnTestAutomation – A blog by Bas Dijkstra who believes that Test automation is a craft and he loves to share what he has done, seen, heard and otherwise learned.

Joe Colantonio – Discover Automation testing awesomeness.

TesterStories.com – Stories from a Software Tester (Jeff Nyman)

Saucelabs – Checkout great resources & blog from Saucelabs

SeleniumFramework – A great website to learn about Automation Technologies.

Learn BDD:

You’ll find great articles about BDD on https://ideas.riverglide.com/

Practice Environments (Free online code editors)

Dabblet: An interactive An interactive CSS playground and code sharing tool. Dabblet saves to Github gists and offers many conveniences for CSS editing.
CodePen: CodePen is a social development environment for front-end designers and developers.
JSFiddle: An online playground for your JavaScript, CSS, HTML

Additional Resources:

https://superdevresources.com/online-code-editors/

Sample Sites to Practice Your Automation Skills

These sites provides you with sample projects to practice your automation skills

http://store.demoqa.com/
http://the-internet.herokuapp.com/ – Lots of practice pages with different type of page elements.
onlinestore.toolsqa.com – Ecommerce website specially built up for Automation testers, See product details & product listings, place free orders and receive emails confirmation. This is a responsive website so mobile automation is also possible.
Parking Calculator Widget – http://adam.goucher.ca/parkcalc/
Brown & Donaldson (B&D) online brokerage Web site – http://bdonline.sqe.com/
The Mercury Tours Web Site – http://newtours.demoaut.com/

Caution:

You should never run automated tests against any public website without getting permission otherwise you can come into trouble.

See Joe Strazzere’s post on Stackexchange about not using Selenium on public websites without authorization.

Practice Programming/Automation Skills:

FreeCodeCamp – A friendly open source community where you learn to code and help nonprofits.

Udemy – Great resource to learn programming, software testing and a lot more.

Lynda – A great resource to learn programming and a lot more.

Slide Share

Some must see slide share presentations:

https://www.slideshare.net/wakaleo/java-power-tools-getting-it-all-together

https://www.slideshare.net/RiverGlide/refactoring-page-objects-the-screenplay-pattern

Books:

Java: A Beginner’s Guide by Herbert Schildt

Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook by Unmesh Gundecha

BDD in Action by John Ferguson Smart

Cucumber Cookbook by Shankar Garg, Packt Publishing

Automate the boring Stuff with Python by Al Sweigart

Clean Code by Robert Cecil Martin

Agile Principles, Patterns & Practices by Robert Martin

GitHub:

https://github.com/shs96c (Simon Stewart – Creator of Selenium WebDriver)

https://github.com/RiverGlide/serenity-web-todomvc-journey (Serenity Journey Pattern Demo)

https://github.com/jan-molak (Jan Molak)

https://github.com/wakaleo (John Ferguson Smart who is well known for book ‘BDD in Action’ and tool ‘Serenity’)

Framework Design:

Showcase your automation skills by designing automation framework. Consider implementing a framework that is domain/project independent. Show a decent solution with clean code, page objects/data factory/ screenplay pattern using data-driven examples

When designing your framework or writing any code keep these principles in mind:

DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself ) or DIE(Duplication is Evil.)
KISS (an acronym for the design principle “Keep it simple, Stupid!”.)
SOLID – SOLID is an acronym that encapsulates five good object-oriented programming principles:

Single Responsibility Principle
Open Closed Principle
Liskov Substitution Principle
Interface Segregation Principle
Dependency Inversion Principle

Additional References:

These resources are very helpful in understanding and setting up test automation framework:

http://safsdev.sourceforge.net/FRAMESDataDrivenTestAutomationFrameworks.htm

Check out Robot Framework. It has detailed documentation and also has a repo in github

Checkout below this link from SatckExchane:

https://sqa.stackexchange.com/questions/12181/design-a-test-automation-framework-for-a-given-xyz-system?rq=1

Names you must know being an Automation Professional:

John Smart – Keynote speaker, technology futurist, foresight strategist, consultant, author on tech trends, future predictions, scientific, digital & business advances.

Simon Stewart – Creator of Selenium WebDriver as well as a core Selenium 2 developer.

Martin Fowler – Object-oriented programming expert and consultant, one of the leaders in refactoring, author of the book ‘Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code’

Bas Dijkstra – Test automation & service virtualization professional. He has a great blog ‘OnTestAutomation‘ and even offers open source workshops!

Antony Marcano – Antony Marcano is a consultant in software craftsmanship, effective software processes, software quality and software testing.

Joe Colantonio You can discover automation testing awesomeness by reading great articles on Joe Colantonio blog.