The pandemic hit us out of nowhere which left all of us stuck in our house with a lot of time on our hands. It has almost been 9 months since the lockdown began but we don’t see the end in our sight, indicating that, we have a lot more time to make up for the time we have already wasted. If you’ve always been wanting to expand your skillset or get into the IT industry as a fresher, taking a course is the best way to get started. There are plenty of online courses that you can find, in a wide array of domains like, quality assurance, software development, website development etc. If you want to get into quality assurance and software testing, then taking a selenium training course is the right way for you to begin!
Why do we use selenium for software testing?
Firstly let us understand what is software testing before we get to selenium training. When a developer, develops an application there are bound to be a few faults in the application of which the developer would be unaware because it is impossible to account for everything that could go wrong. There is 3 major type of errors that a developer could receive. There are a few more but we will only be focusing on the major ones which are bugs, defect and error
Error:
When a developer writes code, it is not rare that he might make a few mistakes. They could anything from missing a variable to not adding a semicolon. If a variable has been named incorrectly then the code won’t act as expected and if a semicolon is missing the program won’t even compile. Such mistakes can be minor but have huge consequences, so it best to catch it in the beginning stages of development, before it has been shipped to the consumer. Such mistakes are called errors.
Bug:
Once the software developer finds that there are no syntax errors in the program and the program has complied successfully we move onto testing the functionality of the software. Even if our program starts, there is no guarantee that it won’t crash in between. There could also be logical errors within the code that would end up producing the wrong output. Besides the software, even the hardware could go wrong and cause the program to crash. These are all coding errors and need to be solved before it reaches the consumer. Thus whatever makes your software work poorly is known as a bug in tester terminology.
Defect:
Now that we have found all the bugs and errors in our software, we can proceed to ship out the product to the consumers. Companies spend a lot of money into the development of every software and people pay huge amounts of money for it as well. All the faults that are found after the product has reached the consumers are known as a defect. A defect could be a confusing user-interface which is difficult for the people to use or a malfunction which causes it to work incorrectly with the customer’s hardware. In such cases, the reputation of the companies suffers huge losses which eventually leads to huge financial losses as they lose the customers trust. Due to which a software tester is a highly paid job, which is in huge demand in the IT industry.
Software testing is of two types – Manual and automated. In Manual software testing, we have a human manually enter each test case which can be very repetitive and boring, which leads to a decrease in his performance, In automated testing, we write scripts which, performs repetitive tasks over and over, which getting tired and with much greater speed than a manual tester.
Selenium is an open-source software which is used to automate web applications testing. It is the most widely used software in the industry for testing websites and web application before it can be made available to the public. Due to its ease of use and compatibility with multiple languages, we use selenium for software testing.
How do we go about learning selenium?
To learn selenium there are a few pre-requisites, but even if you don’t have them worry not since you can easily find the resources online to learn them. You will need to know how to code using an object-oriented programming language like python or java. If you’re completely new I suggest you start with python since it is a lot easier, but knowing java will make you a lot more proficient coder. If you already know how to code you could simply google “Selenium training online” if you want to learn selenium by yourself on the internet or search for “Selenium training near me” and find places around you that can teach you. Both have their perks and downfalls.
So the perks of doing your selenium training online would be that you could do it at your own pace. If you’re a fast learner and don’t need anyone guiding your learning than learning at home is the right way to go. Self- learning also shows that you’re self-motivated which is impressive to employers. If you have a job and won’t be able to make time for classes than online classes would be the way for you to go ahead. On the other hand, having a classroom with a mentor and other students also learning the same thing is a very stimulating environment for a learner. You can have your doubts cleared instantly and have a guide who will be helping you, so definitely offline classes would be more expensive.
So doing a selenium training course would give you a certificate, something to show the recruiters as proof of your selenium training, which would make you a more viable candidate for the job. You would also be earring a lot more as an automation engineer. The average salary ranges from $58k to $111k, so doing a selenium training course during the lockdown is worth thinking about. You can find amazing online courses at H2K infosys to learn it.
