The Bright Side of Being a Test Automation Engineer

Five reasons why I’m passionate about being a test automation engineer

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the article The Dark Side of Being a Test Automation Engineer, and it quickly became one of my most read articles so far.

Also, it had some significant interactions and a mixture of opinions amongst the community. While some didn’t share my past feelings, others felt empathy and somewhat not alone — understood.

Saying that not everything is roses in my previous article, why would I wake up every day and keep passionate about what I do? Odd, right?

Not entirely, because there’s a bright side to every story.

Here are five of the reasons that make me passionate about being a test automation engineer:

• Jack of All Trades, Master of None—High-level speaking, our mission is to thrive quality from the outset. Abstract much, right? But that’s precisely it. And, to succeed with such quality, we’ve to look at a product as a whole, and holy moly, it has dozens of fronts we can start with. Depending on our team, product, or company size, we’ll have the chance to interact with a dozen of different tools and technologies at several levels of a product, from the required infrastructure to the integration of new features into the current source code, from the continuous delivery process till the very end of delivering it to the world. The options are endless.
• Unstoppable Billy Batson—Within the DC comics, Billy Batson is a somewhat rebel kiddo that by itself might not do much, but oh damn, if he yells “SHAZAM!” he becomes an unstoppable force. Being an acronym, each of the letters of “SHAZAM” stands for a legendary figure, and it’s from those figures that Billy pulls his strengths and abilities — Solomon, Hercules, Atlas, Zeus, Achilles, and Mercury. Metaphorically, we’re Billy Batson. We might not do it all by ourselves, but since we’re contributing at every stage of the development life-cycle of a product, with a couple of legendary figures by our side — a team — we’re an unstoppable force. This way, we’re one of the few who single-handedly can impact the whole product daily.