What are good resources for a manual tester to transition to automation?

Question

Nervously looking at job posts, automation and programming is no longer "good-to-have". It is almost a must. I'm a manual tester looking to start working towards automated testing/test automation. I am completely **overwhelmed** as far as where to start. I tried doing a quick Google search, to no avail. What programming languages do I need to be familiar with? What tools? And just out of curiosity, what's popular in the job market? For anyone who started in manual testing and is now an automated tester, what were some of the challenges? Any advice, words of wisdom, or links to other articles is welcome. *********** Location, technologies, prior programming knowledge: 1. Europe 2. Web and mobile-application 3. Basic knowledge in Java My plan to become an automation tester: > Learn Selenium using Java & TestNG. Learn QTP using VBScript, > JMeter, LoadRunner for performance testing.

Answer 1

You seem to have a great plan. Just two more things to consider in the list of useful things to consider. In my organization the front end QAs also use Sauce Labs (something you can look into). But there also needs to be automated tests of back-end components as well and the back end QAs use Java (because the back end devs use Java).