Happy New Year and welcome to My Automation Journey. For this first post, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version.
I started in QA in 2001 and eventually worked my way up to QA Lead and QA Manager at two different software companies.
In the two companies that I worked at between 2001 and the Spring of 2017, were companies that were heavy in manual testing and had legacy software technologies in COBOL and FoxPro. I learned an awful lot working at both of those companies and very much cherished the experiences, but at the same time my loyalty in working at both of these companies, was part of my own detriment, as I was not keeping up with current trends, technologies, etc. Basically, I was not progressing and hit a wall. I decided in early 2017 that I wanted to no longer manage and go back to my first love testing.
I started looking for new opportunities in the Spring of 2017 and because I had been at my previous employer for 7 1/2 years, when looking at open job requisitions at other companies, my eyes were bugged out because I wasn’t familiar with some of the requirements that were being asked. Most if not all QA jobs were looking for candidates that had experience with automation and my experience to that point had been with record/playback tools. I thought I was good to go because I did have record/playback experience and some experience with VBScript. I filled out applications and because of what I thought was a very strong QA background, I knew the offers were going to be coming in like crazy. Gut check or as Kendrick Lamar said, “Sit down…be Humble” They were coming in but not as frequent as I thought and after talking with a few employers during phone screenings and such, it was clear and evident that I needed to learn automation beyond record and playback.
This is what brings us here to My Automation Journey. I left my job in May 2017, joined a startup and I’m having the time of my life! I’m learning new things daily and more importantly, I’m embarking on a new career as an automation engineer and learning to code as well. I’m still incredibly new to all of this, but I wanted to create this blog to share my journey into automation, as it hasn’t been very long at all, continue to get advice from others, share what has and hasn’t worked for me, and hopefully be a place of education and encouragement for those that are coming from a similar place that I did.
I do want to thank some people that I have yet to meet face to face, but have helped me either directly or indirectly, in getting to this point, as I’ve either asked them questions, followed their blogs, watched their videos, or follow them on social media:
Mike Clark 
Outstanding Mike! I am excited to follow along and possibly try out some of the successful things that have worked for you and others. At my current company we host a very wide variety of applications that run locally and/or globally mainframe, client server and some cloud based. We have teams that are using automation in different ways but I want to gain more personal mastery in the development area, looking at Selenium and other options. Keep up the great blog 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is a matchless privilege in the list Mike. Thank you so much.
-Onur
LikeLiked by 1 person