Why We Started TestCraft Academy

At best, Test Automation is a niche profession. At worst, it's arcane. People who have worked in software development for more than a few years know: finding a Test Automation Engineer can be difficult. Finding a good one can sometimes feel impossible. It isn't unusual for a manager of an agile team to spend several months looking for somebody to fill that very specific gap. A few years ago, I interviewed with a company that had been looking for a good SDET for over a year (and this wasn't out in the country; this was London, where there should have been plenty of talent!)

Of course, when one considers the career progression of most of us Quality-Focused types, this isn't too surprising. A developer takes base concepts and uses their engineering skills to build something. A tester uses their experience and sense of exploration to take something that has been built and break it down into its base concepts. A Test Automator needs to be able to do both: development and test; programming and exploration. Some people gravitate toward this naturally, but for the rest, they need to start from somewhere else. Developers don't tend to move into Test, which means most people tend to start as testers and grow their development skills until they can automate their work. And once a tester has those skills, how many of them stay in test and how many of them move into development, where the money and prestige tend to be better? Far more than stick around to dive deep into the world of Test Automation, that's for certain.

And so, the industry is left with people who either started in Test and learned to program, or those who decided to go into Test Automation from the start. These are the people whose natural inclination is to have a foot in both camps, to improve the field of testing through the discipline of engineering.

So, how does one of these dedicated acolytes actually increase their skills? How does somebody become a better Test Automation Engineer? There are a lot of courses people can take about programming. One can easily find meetups about everything from SQL to JavaScript, to AI, but they don't cover how to test the applications people build with those tools. There are ISTQB certifications for testing, of course, and even one for test automation, but beyond going through Agile principles and describing best-practices, do they teach somebody to fill the QAE role in an Agile team? A role which is often performed as a specialist, with little to no expertise coming from the rest of the team? Best practices are excellent, but how does one learn the craft of test automation? Maybe you know how to use a test framework. Maybe you even know how to build a test framework from open source packages and libraries. But do you know which libraries to use? Which tools? Which framework? Does the application-under-test need Cypress? Selenium? Playwright? Something else entirely? Are the test pipelines fast enough? How do we make them faster? Which tests need to be automated in the first place? How do the QAE keep up with the developers if the test code is dependent on the dev code to be pushed?

We started TestCraft Academy because we know this struggle, and we've dealt with these questions, having experienced them ourselves in our 30+ years of combined experience as QAEs. There are best practices, and then there's knowing what to ask for from your devs so that you can speed up your development and run time so that the whole team can have fast feedback every time they push a new set of commits. There's knowing that Selenium and Playwright can both automate browsers, and there's knowing which one you absolutely must use if any of your tests verify that videos are rendering in your Test environment.

We started TestCraft Academy, because we really do believe that creating and automating tests is a craft: a mixture of science, engineering, experience, and even intuition that a tester develops over years of practice. We've been there. We've been honing our craft for a long time, and we have hard-won, practical, experiences to share with anybody who wants to accelerate their career in Test Automation.

All of our workshops are face-to-face, so if you're in the Southampton area (or can be here for a day or two of learning), and want to take a course, register your interest and we'll let you know when the next one is starting. Alternatively, if you're looking for something we're not advertising yet, use the contact form and get in touch: we're always interested in hearing from other craftspeople.

TestCraft Academy: practical experiences in test automation.