Creating a Test Automation Portfolio Episode 1: Setting a Goal

If you are interested in hearing an audio version of this article, please check out this Racket.

Not for the first time, I’d like to give my thanks to Angie Jones for her post “10 portfolio projects for aspiring test automation engineers“. Reading it made perfect sense to me, so much so that I wondered why I hadn’t thought about creating a portfolio before.

If someone were to come to an interview for a testing related position armed with their own GitHub repository containing samples of their work I can only think this would be a positive thing, for the following reasons:-

• Even if it isn’t perfect, it gives conversations about automation a jumping off point – “can you tell me why you did X” and “what would you like to do to improve Y“, “when wouldn’t you use automation for Z” etc.
• It demonstrates an enthusiasm and passion for testing
• It allows a nervous interviewee an opportunity to show their skills without just speaking about them
• If they don’t yet have commercial experience in that area, it is a great way to demonstrate what they could do if given the right opportunity
• There may be some useful code which (assuming it is the property of the person who wrote it and not copied and pasted from someone else’s repo) may be applicable to the work-related project and the ideas can be quickly lifted and shifted to add value.

Now, lets be clear, I have only been working in automation for a few years, so I am still learning and would still class myself as a beginner/intermediate level in lots of areas. But I’m also keen to take advantage of the free online courses and resources aimed at people just like me, so I’m setting myself a long term goal with this activity.

Goal – in 1 years time I will attempt to have the following on GitHub:-

1. C#/Java solution for web browser automation for Opencart using Selenium WebDriver
   Login
   buy an item (interact with multiple pages) – ideally atomically by API calls
   Use POM and clean code
2. JavaScript solution for web browser automation for Opencart using Cypress
3. API testing for Restful Booker using Postman
   Newman calls
   use GET, POST, DELETE methods
   Use parameters, environment configs, request bodies and tests – learn about mocking and try using that
4. CI integration testing using TAIKO to read programatically from an external data source
5. UIpath to do RPA testing preferably reading from a sql server express database to populate values to somewhere in the test
6. BONUS: NUnit Testing of Restful Booker
7. BONUS #2: Codeless UI Automation with TestProject

Wish me luck!

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash