Coding Skills

Case Study:

I work as a QA for a small startup and I do both testing for release and automation. How do a QA automation engineer keep up to date with coding skills. I feel like at times I keep spending lot of time in doing verification and testing. Is there anything that I should be doing out of my work so that I keep practicing coding.

Recommendation:

This is always a challenge. I’m also often the sole tester and automation developer in my companies. There’s so much to learn whether it be coding practice, testing practice, learning a new tool, etc. The challenge is to set one learning goal and go for it. So if you want to get better at coding, set yourself the goal of building something. Even if it’s small, set that goal. and then ideally make it part of your review / evaluation process. so you can work on it during work time.

-- Chris Kenst

Recommendation:

A small note to add, but when writing automated tests, you are writing code, and so all the best practices (in terms of general programming) apply. Having other engineers provide code review can be an immensely useful way to learn how to code better.

it also helps a great idea to maintain test code in the same language as your application under test. less context switching and more easily collaborate with your devs to pick up and apply new mechanisms into your test code. you’ll start catching bugs in dev PRs too, and can help with unit test efficacy.

Reviewing others’ code can be the perfect place to ask questions about why something was done a certain way, which is a good way to do code review anyway so it makes for good practice

-- Chris Nejame

Reference:

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