Which Selenium Webdriver Skills are Important for Automation?
Today, we are discussing the essential Selenium Webdriver skills that every software tester should know. Even the hiring managers can use this blog post as a checklist so that they get to know what all skills a particular candidate should have to shortlist for a Selenium Webdriver job profile.
Another fact that both the candidate and the recruiter should consider is that skills and the expectations vary depending upon the experience a person has. We’ve factored in this point by addressing the skill set and other requirements based on the different experience levels.
Decide Which Skills are Important for Selenium?
While a QA engineer plans for a job change, the first step is either prepare a resume from scratch or update the existing one. But there are many questions to answer and several changes to make before declaring it as final.
Let’s list down a few of these questions to keep in mind.
- Is my profile sufficiently covering the skills required for the job?
- Are the work area, roles, and responsibilities mentioned justifying my case?
- Would it meet the expectations of recruiters?
On the contrary, the hiring managers would also be looking for some answers to their questions.
- What are the potential skills and work areas should the resume have?
- Does the profile match the prevailing industry standards?
- Has he mentioned the required skills and area of work?
If you are willing to learn Selenium Webdriver from scratch, then you must consider checking out the list of top Selenium Webdriver tutorial.
Selenium Webdriver Skills for Testers
Let’s now focus on the required Selenium Webdriver skills and how they are fit in for candidates with different experience levels.
Entry level Skills (0-2 yrs)
1- The candidate should have used Selenium IDE for recording scripts and creating test suites.
2- He must have covered module based test scenarios that help to validate the application before deployment.
3- The candidate may not fit for the Entry level Selenium Webdriver skills if he just used IDE occasionally for filling up online forms.
4- For advanced skills, he should have used continuous integration tools like Bamboo or Jenkins.
5- He should know how to run the Selenium tests from the Jenkins dashboard.
6- A basic level of HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS knowledge is what required to work with web applications.
7- Good understanding of DOM and experience with different types of locators like XPath, ID, CSS, and By-ID selectors is a mandatory skill.
8- He should be aware of the source code management tools like GIT and SVN.
9- Candidate should be able to demonstrate his Selenium skills if requested by the interview panel.
Intermediate level (2-5 yrs).
1- The candidate should have moved to use Selenium Webdriver for web testing. And he should be able to spell out the differences.
2- Any of the Java/Python/.Net programming skills are mandatory. It’ll also depend on the job requirement.
3- Prior experience of working with TestNG/JUnit testings frameworks.
4- Understanding of object-oriented concepts, multithreading, and IPC.
5- Handling of AJAX calls using Selenium Webdriver’s <wait> mechanism.
6- Capable of adding new features to the existing test frameworks.
7- Regular monitoring of the CI (Jenkins) jobs and able to take care of the broken builds.
8- A greater SCM tool (e.g. GIT) skill is sought-after. He should have successfully managed the merge conflicts in Git or SVN.
9- The candidate may have created a sanity test suite to cover the happy-path test cases.
Advance level (5-10 yrs.)
1- At this level, it is expected to have a solid programming background of the languages stated in the “Intermediate level” point-2.
2- Additionally, he should have a working knowledge of design patterns and advanced Selenium Webdriver skills in a live project.
3- He should have crafted a large test suite to meet the business requirements.
4- Ability to coach junior team members is preferred.
5- Must have automated data-driven and localization-related test requirements.
6- SQL/Database skill will add value as sometimes testing requires DB validation.
7- Good understanding of behavior-driven testing tools like Concordion, JDave, JBehave, Easyb, Cucumber etc.
8- The candidate should know when to use the above tools, and when to stick with hybrid test suites.
9- He should have done cross-browser testing and aware of the challenges.
Expert level (10+ yrs)
1- Practical knowledge of parallel test execution in a virtualized environment. For example, running scripts oESXI/VSphere infrastructure.
2- He should be well-versed in managing automation jobs using Jenkins or Bamboo CI tools.
3- Experience in setting up Continuous delivery for at least one live project.
4- Able to manage automation agents on Amazon cloud infra also known as AWS.
5- Ability to integrate automation results with any bug tracking tools like JIRA or TestRail.
6- He should have built reusable frameworks and libraries using Selenium WebDriver that could help to reduce execution time and increase performance.
7- An expert candidate would be one who has the potential to debug the Selenium webdriver source code. And commands the ability to propose a solution or suggestion to the Core Selenium team.
Before You Leave
We wish the above suggestions would be helpful for you to discover the right set of Selenium Webdriver skills. And it would be a lot easier for you to know what to improve in the skill set. Simultaneously, the hiring managers can refer this post to prepare a checklist that would help them filtering the right candidates for open job profiles.
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