Automation with Cypress: What I learned so far
What I learned so far: from writing crude tests to learning how to abstract selectors in page models, using mocks to imitate API behaviour, making tests deterministic, to running tests on CI.
ReadJob hunting in the time of Covid-19
My plan has been to spend the first three months of 2020 learning and improving myself, in preparation for my big job hunt beginning in April. Unfortunately, the world has gone upside down in the last few weeks. I realise this might delay my dreams a bit, but I am pretty confident that I, and everyone else, will be back on track soon ... For now, I will keep learning and applying for jobs. As part of that, I decided to take my private notes and put them in this public blog in order to boost my CV, but more importantly, to document my journey so that I hopefully look at it with a big smile in the near future.
ReadCypress vs Puppeteer
These are my notes from an exercise I did to implement the same test suite in both Cypress and Puppeteer. At my work experience at the BBC, I got introduced to Puppeteer as an alternative to Cypress for writing automated browser tests. It looked quite interesting and I spent some of my days there writing some basic tests. I started this exercise in order to be to compare Puppeteer with Cypress more closely.
ReadMy two weeks with the BBC
I got to do a two-week work placement at BBC Scotland, and it was amazing! The whole experience was very informative and rewarding. I learned how the technologies I have been learning are powering one of the biggest websites of the world, and I was also specially happy to put some of the theoretical knowledge I gained around testing, into good practice to see how it applies in the real world. I learned a lot and got to participate in various tasks, scrum ceremonies and shadow some amazing team members. The main advantage though is that - coming out of the two weeks - I felt confident and empowered to pursue my dream of becoming a software tester. I also know now that BBC is my dream employer, and one day I will work there :)
ReadMy roadmap to success
I found this great blog post by coincidence: How I interview testers. It includes a list of topics that the writer of the blog, uses for interviewing testers. I decided to use this as a checklist of topics I need to learn in order to learn about software testing. Each week, I will pick a topic from it and learn about it, whether by Googling, finding blop posts, books, or the best possible way: asking my mentors at CodeYourFuture.
ReadWhy testing?
I got interested in testing after spending a day shadowing the team in Aggreko along other CodeYourFuture students back in November 2019. We had several talks on the day, including one from a Tester, who went through how they do testing in the company. I loved the presentation about test automation especially. When I asked one of my CodeYourFuture mentors about testing and its career prospects, he pointed me towards Cypress framework, as it uses JavaScript, and it's close to concepts I have used in jQuery (selectors) and assertions with Jest framework. I spent a day looking at tutorials online, and following a course on egghead.io.
Read