Roles and Responsibilities of an Automation Test Engineer

17 August 2024

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In many companies, especially large corporations, it is impossible to manually deploy and check hundreds of test cases for each of these projects. For this reason, people coined the term, Automation Testing, where developers utilize various software testing tools such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation), Selenium WebDriver Automation testing, and many others to automate the menial parts of project testing.

If you also want to get into such a domain, you must know the roles and responsibilities they carry. In this article, we’ll be talking about the roles and responsibilities of an Automation Test Engineer. But before that, let’s also understand who’s an automation test engineer.

Who is an Automation Test Engineer?

An Automation Test Engineer is one who programs software to test, simulate, and design new pieces of automation software. These Engineers work and develop to bring better results to the new software technologies. Automation Test Engineers develop codes and programs to automate the testing tasks. An ATE is extremely knowledgeable about various aspects of a project; basically the ins and outs of a project, so that he can test every known possible aspect of said program/software. For an Automation Test Engineer it becomes necessary to cover all the basics of Automation Testing which you can learn from Complete Guide to Software Testing and Automation: Master Java, Selenium and Cucumber.

An Automation Test Engineer can also have many roles, such as:

Software Test Engineer
API Tester
QA (Quality Assurance) Analyst
Database Tester
Back End Tester

As mentioned above, they should also be able to improve the quality of the product, as much as possible, to prevent rival companies from getting the upper hand.

But, is it essential to have such people or could we make do without them these days?

Why Become an Automation Test Engineer?

To compete with the ever-increasing speed of technology improvements, it has become a necessity to automate technical tasks. With increasing demand for the role, many big companies such as Microsoft, Amazon, etc. provide great salaries for their Automation Test Engineers. Many small businesses/ startups are in need of Automation Test Engineers to test out their websites, business models, websites, and so on.

For those who love problem-solving and learning new concepts regularly, Automation Test Engineer role will be the most suitable job for you.

Let’s see what the Automation Test Engineers do in a setting.

Responsibilities of an Automation Test Engineer

There are many reasons you’d want to have an Automation Test Engineer in a project. Especially, when it comes to software testing, the developers simply check different use cases and cross-check whether the expected output matches with the output given by the program or not. If that is not the case, they will inform the developer teams and ask them to make the necessary changes to fix this problem.

But, this role comes with a caveat, which is that most of the testing processes become redundant in nature and hence, the processes become tedious. This is where an Automation Test Engineer can make or break a project. He could develop various RPA (Robotic Processing Automation) applications to automate the redundant parts of the tests so that they can focus on more unique problems related to the software they’re testing. One of the key abilities an Automation Test Engineer should have is the ability to withstand enormous amounts of pressure and a keen eye for detail.

We can infer that an Automation Test Engineer should work their best in an Agile Methodology. Other than that, they should also be able to meet deadlines on time. While this may apply to most job roles in the IT department, it is specifically for an Automation Test Engineer that they should be able to meet the deadlines, lest any updates from the developers for any debugging will take a lot of time.

But, how does one start to work to become an Automation Test Engineer?

Prerequisites to Become an Automation Test Engineer

To become an Automation test Engineer, one has to be proficient in many programming languages, like:

Java: It is the oldest Object-Oriented programming language. Native applications are still built using Java to this day. Hence, if the coding base is made from Java, it is easier to build automation testing programs using Java. Its constant updates and ability to run classes separately make it ideal for developing ideal testing procedures.
Python: It is one of the most popular interpreted languages used out there. Other than its fame in the Machine Learning/Data Science community, it is also a popular programming language used to code and develop software/apps. Hence, it goes without saying that Python is also used to build automation testing software related to Python-developed applications. Due to being able to import libraries with various functionalities, Python is one of the most used languages.
Database Languages: It is crucial for an Automation Test Engineer to learn and know how to work with different Databases, be it SQL Databases such as MySQL, Postgres SQL or NoSQL Databases, such as MongoDB and Cassandra.
Selenium WebDriver: For browser automation testing, Selenium WebDriver plays a huge, important role. It is a browser automation engine compatible with multiple programming languages such as Python, and Java mentioned above.
RPA Tools: Many RPA tools such as UiPath, Selenium, Protractor, Travis CI and so on are used by many Automation Test Engineers to automate testing on various aspects of an application.
API Testing: An Automation Test Engineer should be knowledgeable about APIs or at least the ones used by the software developers to test them and check whether they give out a normal output or not.

Note: It is not essential to be proficient in all languages mentioned above. Just general knowledge about how these languages work and execute is enough for basic testing.

But, is it worth the career transition you need to do one to become an Automation Test Engineer?

Role of an Automation Test Engineer:

Some of the most important roles of an Automation Test Engineer are:

Identify Test Cases: One of the most important roles of an Automation Test Engineer is to identify the most important and necessary use cases to perform testing.
Documenting: An Automation Test Engineer should document their various testing methods and their results and submit it as a report during a monthly review.
Test Plan: From the documentation, the Automation Test Engineer should be able to build up a test plan, which they can execute after getting approval from the board.
Configure the Necessary Test Environments: To perform the Automated Testing, a virtual environment needs to be built so that they can perform the testing without changing the origins; or code in the process. It can range from configuring a virtual environment simulating the test programs to building a Selenium configuration environment for in-depth browser testing.
Automate design: Once the prototype of the testing framework is successful, the Automation Test Engineer should use the resources to automate the design so that they need not manually redeploy the test cases each and every time. After the automation is successful, it can be implemented into the project.
Create, enhance, and debug: After the implementation/ deployment, the Automation Test Engineer should be able to create new updates, enhance/ upgrade the existing model, and also debug any possible errors experienced, that were unaccounted for, during the developer’s phase.
Monitor Defects: It goes without saying that when deploying an automation task, there are some defects in a project. They should be monitored regularly by the Automation Test Engineer to fix them, or at the least, make them less apparent.
Interact with customers/clients: An Automation Test Engineer regularly connects with their project clients/customers to discuss future plans, and/or work on any defects/problems faced by the clients as a result of any updates made earlier. They then work on the errors encountered by the client and find a workaround or solution to deal with the problems.

Life-Cycle of an Automation Test Engineer

The life-cycle of an Automation Test Engineer mainly depends on these 6 production points mentioned below:

Determine the Scope: The Automation Test Engineer should be able to find the ceiling/ find the places where the testing can work and where it will not and specify it to junior testers/
Select the Right Tool: When it comes to automation tools, the credibility of the software changes depending on the project. Hence, it is important for testers to select the tools for the best results.
Document the plans: While it was mentioned earlier, one of the life cycles is to document the possible test cases and results garnered from individual tests.
Set up a test Environment: One of the most important aspects, of an Automation Test Engineer should be able to set up a test environment or a virtual environment simulating the area the software will be working on.
Automate and Analyze: After the test environment is successful, steps can be taken to automate the test Environment tasks and analyze the results. The analysis is then added to the documentation or monthly review reports.
Generate Test Reports: After the automation, the Automation Test Engineer needs to generate test reports about the results from the testing and compile them together. These test reports are then sent to the developer teams/management who will update the software as necessary.

Now that we know the general workflow of an Automation Test Engineer, what is the extent of their scope? Will this job pay well?

Automation Test Engineer: Scope and Salary

Many Automation Test Services are actively hiring Automation Test Engineers for their services. Some of the notable companies known for testing reviews are:

QA Wolf
Mobot
QualityLogic
DeviQA
iBeta

An Automation Test Engineer’s starting salary starts from 6.5 LPA to about 10 LPA. In foreign countries, the average salary for an Automation Test Engineer is about 100,000 USD per year.

Conclusion

To conclude, the role of an Automation Test Engineer is vital in today’s workflow. Due to the introduction of Generative AI, the speed of introducing new applications to the public has skyrocketed. This also means that the amount of time needed to test these applications has also drastically decreased as a result. This means that there is research going into Automating as many tasks as possible with even better software specifically built for testing or introducing better RPA tools.