Nowadays, knowing how to program is not a skill only for software developers. More and more, in the agile world, testers or even business analysts must know programming. But how to start learning how to program if you always were a manual tester, or if you became an analyst, without being a developer before?
In 2011 , I met the CodeCademy plataform, where you can learn programming languages for free and in an interative way. From there, you can learn about front-end and back-end software developmentblog with the most common languages in the market, like HTML5 & CSS3, JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, Python and Ruby. Also, from this plataform you can learn how to build web services, for software integration purposes, and how to use public APIs, provided by third parties.
As a tester, each day I belive more that everyone needs to know about programming, not just because more common routines are been automated by software, but also because by knowing this kind of technology, we can communicate better with technical people, and we can also start applying ideas that can be transformed in desired products or services.
As a tester that works with software test automation, it’s very important knowing how to identify elements on the page, for performing actions and interacting with the application. With CodeCademy you can learn about the HTML structure and the most common tags, like <html></html>, <head></head>, <title></title>, <body></body>, <p>, <br>, etc. Also, you can learn about CSS (for stylize the web site or application), how to add classes and IDs to web elements, and so on.
Another nice programming language that I’ve learned by using this wonderful plataform, is JavaScript (JS), that can be used for manipulating HTML elements ; for applying different styling when a user hover the mouse in some web element, for example; how to animate a web site; how to use object-orientation with JS, and other very interesting things for making your application or web site interactive. And then, I learned JQuery, for doing the same things, in an easier way.
Also, it’s very important knowing server-side programming languages, for example, for creating a non-SQL data base that will be consumed by the test (if the application uses something like MongoDB in the database side, for instance). With CodeCademy, you can learn server-side programming languages like PHP, or even some of the modern ones, like Python and Ruby.
Another good point, is that today (thanks for the technology and the higher maturity in software development of great companies, like Google, Facebook, Twitter and others) the software development is increasingly being thought as little parts that connects to each other, as services easily integrated, and also, as something that is possible to easily be tested separately.
With this, I challenge you to access the CodeCademy’s link: http://www.codecademy.com and start learning how to program in a very easy and funny way. Maybe, you can build the new popular web application that will be used around the world, and surely, you’ll develop very important skills to start being a better professional.
I hope I have planted this seed in your mind.
Please, provide me feedback about this post, and have a good week! =)
See you!
QA’s tip: Get out of you comfort zone and start learning something new.
TALKING ABOUT TESTING 