Today I would like to share with you brief reviews of two test automation books I’ve recently read — “Software Testing Automation Tips: 50 Things Automation Engineers Should Know” and “Mastering Mobile Test Automation” (affiliate links).
“Software Testing Automation Tips: 50 Things Automation Engineers Should Know” by Gennadiy Alpaev, 2017
- My rating: 4/5
- Amazon rating: 3.5/5 (affiliate link)
This is book is a list of tips for test automation engineers, and I’m happy to say that the tips are solid and are written in a brief and concise manner. Another good thing about this book is that it is tool- or language-agnostic, and the recommendations are general enough to not become outdated in the next few years. Oh, and it is brief!
I think this book will be most useful for junior or middle SDETs, but more experienced automation engineers might not find a lot of new information there.
The reason why my rating is 4 and not 5, is because this book desperately needs an editor who is a native English speaker. Although I don’t think that anyone is going to have problems with understanding the contents, it shows that the author is not a native speaker.
“Mastering Mobile Test Automation” by Feroz Pearl Louis and Gaurav Gupta, 2015
- My rating: 3/5
- Amazon rating: 4/5 (affiliate link)
Let me start by admitting that I only read a half of the book. There is number issues with it, which made me feel that I’m just wasting my time reading it.
First of all, it is outdated. It was published in 2015, i.e. ages ago for IT world, and it shows. Unfortunately, it is not one of those books which can be read years after they were written and still be relevant. For comparison, the previous book, which was published only two years later, didn’t loose its value in my opinion. Although, I must admit, that this book is on more narrow and dynamic topic of mobile automation, and it is difficult, if possible, to write a “timeless” book about it.
Second issue is that it doesn’t have a clearly defined target audience. I think that it provides way to little information for a beginner, since there are no clearly defined recommendations on how to start with mobile test automation using a particular tool, and the code snippets they provide are also be too complicated and therefore useless for a beginner. On other hand, for advanced automation engineer the provided information will be mostly already known or not useful (why would I need to know how to do this specific thing in tool A, if I don’t use it, and the book itself is not a guide for tool A?).
As you probably already guessed, I cannot really recommend this book to anyone. The only reason I gave this book 3 stars, and not only one or two, is because it might have been more useful 6 years ago, when it was published.
Please let me know if there are any test automation books you can recommend or would like me to review.
