Recently I’ve watched a great talk from Selenium Conf 2023 by Mark Winteringham.

He could expose something that I believe most professionals cannot realise.

Automation testers focused too much in their technical skills.

To help to elaborate that, Mark asks 2 questions:

• what we try to say we do?
• what we are really doing?

What do we try to say we do?

The first thing that called my attention was his research based on a job website (surprisingly not LinkedIn), collecting information about job roles.

Most of the automation testers try to expose that they have knowledge about tools (Java, JavaScript, Python, JUnit, Test NG, Selenium, Cucumber, Cypress, Playwright, Rest Assured, Postman, SOAP UI - the list is long).

We focus on these things, like if they represent the importance of what we do. It seems that it is more important to know how to use a tool or technology than to test something well.

From Mark's research, he sorted testing job skills in 3 different areas:

He listed jobs on the Indeed website and classified them.

• Testing skills (31%)
  • Risk analyses
  • Writing and raising bugs reports
  • Ensuring quality
• Automation skills (33%)
  • Maintaining flaky tests
  • Set up environments
  • Set up pipelines
• Tools skills (36%)

After all, the majority of jobs list more tools than testing or automation skills.

But, should we focus on the tools, or the principles?

What are we really doing?

There isn’t any right answer for this question, however, Mark asks the audience to write down 3 simple things:

• What do we do on a daily basis?
• What do we do on a weekly basis?
• What do we do on a monthly basis?

After answering these 3 questions, we can start to think more clearly about what we do.

Automation testers need different skills that are not directly related to any technology or tool:

• plan tests
• set up pipelines
• understand system requirements
• report defects
• prioritise tasks
• write down documentation
• communicate with the team
• investigate issues

None of these are specifically related to tools or technologies, but they are all testing skills required to do the daily basis work.

The image of what an automator is, is not the same as we are actually doing or getting involved in.

By the end of the talk, Mark listed some things that an automator does:

To me, it was a great talk to reflect over testing skills. We usually focus heavily on learning and specialising in tools, but we usually leave basic principles aside.

The talk from Mark is available on YouTube:

• What Exactly Do You Do in Test Automation?