Improve Skill-sets

Case Study:

I’m a Qa Eng focusing on automation, looking to improve my personal-professional skill-sets, wondering if there are people who are or who know of others that fill roles like coach, mentor etc, something of a career coach/mentor but with more of an emphasis on creating a program of self study, one that may lead somewhere specifically but may also leave options open.

Recommendation 1:

This is a broad topic and so much of teaching and learning depends on the individuals involved. In broad strokes, here's the path that I set before new SDETs on my team (as their leader/coach):

1. Take the time to learn the tools and technologies you'll be using. Our shop uses a lot of Python and HTTP, so everyone gets a basic language course plus a tour of RFC 7231.

2. Learn good software development practices. Everyone works through The RSpec Book in which all the examples are Ruby. I leverage this to reinforce the language fundamentals by asking my charges to translate them to Python (and Behave/unittest instead of Cucumber/RSpec).

3. Build a community of excellence. We practice pair and mob programming as well as code reviews where we discuss decisions, consequences, and alternatives.

4. Aim higher. After The RSpec Book, advance to Uncle Bob's Clean Code and then Clean Architecture.

Note how little of this is focused on a particular set of technologies or tools. This fits into your "leave options open" requirement which I fully endorse. Technologies come and go. Principles and practices endure much longer.

I'll also note an oddity in our practice. We model developer-in-test as a specialized developer, not as an advanced tester as most shops do. I believe very strongly that this approach is superior and would be delighted to defend it. Oh, another book that I push is the venerable xUnit Test Patterns by Gerard Meszaros.

The Rspec Book is a trojan horse. It's ostensibly about RSpec but it's actually about software craftsmanship.

-- Mike Duskis