What Exactly Do You Do in Test Automation? - Mark Winteringham, Ministry of Testing

If you took the time to sit down to answer the question “what do you do as an Automator on a daily, weekly or monthly basis”, what would you come up with? Would it just be coding, coding and more coding or would your answers highlight a wide and wonderful range of activities you carry out?

For a skilled Automator, success relies on more than just being comfortable with programming languages and tools. It requires a diverse range of skills, techniques and experiences which the newly released Ministry of Testing automation curriculum has captured and organised in a way so that everyone can see the abilities an Automator has or can attain.

In this talk, Mark will share how his own experiences and the experiences of other automators have helped curate the Ministry of Testing automation curriculum. Through these stories, we’ll learn how the journey of an Automator is a varied one that can easily employ pen, paper and questions as much as IDEs, frameworks and libraries. We’ll also learn how an open source community curated curriculum can help you regardless of your abilities, role and context and how you can help it grow by sharing your own experience.
Outline/Structure

The talk will start by introducing the current challenges with how we see ourselves as Automators and what we do. We'll look at how the impacts training, hiring and discourse around Automation as a topic. Then we'll learn about the Ministry of Testing automation curriculum and explore some stories that illustrate why, as Automators, we do more than code scripts and tests. Finally, we conclude with an invitation to the audience to share their experiences to help improve the curriculum for the future.
Learning Outcome

By the end of this talk you’ll be able to:

Relate to the experiences of automators and their responsibilities
Outline the diverse range of skills, knowledge and techniques and Automator requires
Share your own experiences to support a community-curated curriculum for automators

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should) also be automated as well. For more infomation check out: https://www.selenium.dev/