QA Career path 2021

If you have joined a company as a Quality Analyst(QA), this guide will lay out a roadmap for you to work upon. I have seen so many people trying to switch from manual to automation, so this guide will come in handy.

Let me give you a brief introduction about myself.

I am a 28 year old Quality analyst with an experience of 5.8 years as a Quality Analyst, I am so eager to learn new things and have started this blog back in July 2019, till date I have written 123 articles and there is lot more to come. I used to be a manual tester and the automation concept really fascinated me a lot and ideally I am always looking for a 1 click pass rate for my test cases. I started with SOAP UI automation then switched to webservices later.

QA Career path 2021

Where do I start?

A lot of people I see start learning Selenium directly but I would say it is not a good practice to jump to Selenium directly. Firstly you have to build your logics, your coding standards by learning any one programming language. Learn it at your pace, don't fasten your learning. Consider me for an example, I have been learning the code until today although been associated with the industry from past 6 years. I am a slow learner but whatever topic I choose I try to learn it in the detailed way as much as possible. You can go with any programming language based upon your understanding, although I would suggest you to start with Java because there are lot of resources available online for free for Java. Try visiting Guru 99 tutorials for Java.

Now once you get hold of any programming language, you have a career path to select in QA -

1. UI Automation
2. API Automation
3. Unit Testing

Unit testing is performed by developer by using Junit, then the code is moved to QA for API testing and finally it is released to UI.

Per my experience, you should start with API testing because it is faster and will help you build your logics. Refactoring and maintenance is minimal in API. You might be interested to learn about webservices, APIs, HTTP status code, XML, JSON, BDD and databases if you want to pursue a career as an API tester.

BDD Framework

The most common framework being used by most of the IT people in their projects. A common language Gherkin is used to write the test cases in natural language by using keywords like when, then, given, etc. The most common framework is cucumber, behave and specflow.

While tools like rest assured will help you to make requests. 

Now we have known 3 technologies so far. Java, Cucumber and Rest Assured. Once you get hold of it, try to learn Selenium, You can start with a pattern called Page Object Model(POM) wherein every webpage is maintained in a Java class.

Upto this point if you have learnt these technologies you are really competitive in the market and may survive the next 15 years in IT. Trust me these are really basic technologies you should know if you have started as a QA. Don't worry about the learning pace, drive it slowly but drive it consistently.