I would like to share my experience to prepare my skills for applying as SDET
First Step is learn the manual testing.
- Learn about manual testing. Read tutorial about WHAT, WHY, HOW to do testing for software manually.
- Learn to make documentation such as Test Cases, Test Plan, and Test Report
- Learn to read software documentation such as Plan, Requirement, Business Cases, UI/UX, mockup, prototype and many other available.
- Try to test manually any website. Just do a basic things such as check the links, contents, journey, and flow. You may something that you want or can be improved.
- Last for the first step, understand the SDLC or Software Development Life Cycle.
Second Step, Learn The Automation/Engineering Part
- Learn the concept of Backend and Frontend. Understand how they are needed to build a software especially for website.
- Learn how API works. It is the bridge between Backend and Frontend.
- Start to learn HTML and CSS. You don’t need to master them. You only need to understand them so that you can use “inspect” in browser. Sometimes bugs can be seen from the HTML and CSS.
- Choose an automation tools. There are many automation framework such as cypress, robotframework, selenium and many more. My suggestion is start with Javascript. It is commonly used to build front end and tool such as cypress also use Javascript. You will understand the basic concept about programming language and how to use Javascript. Then start learn how to use the automation framework. For this one you should master it, because the core of SDET is in this automated test. Create automation test for UI and also API test. It will help you understand the fundamental of automated testing.
- Learn GIT and CI/CD process. This is very important when you work as QA. You must know how to manage you code with other team. Also, you may need to setup testing in CI/CD process that run in pipeline.
I hope for anyone interested in QA can find this short article helpful. If you have any other advices, feel free to add more.