Becoming an automation tester from zero

Question

I already have a manual tester background, but I want to upgrade it to automation. I had only a few attempts with programming in my life, so these are my questions:
1) Is it hard to become an AT without particular programming skills gained before? How long does it take to learn automation programming from zero to professional?
2) Should I try programming in general before or can I start directly studying Selenium, SQL (or something else?)?
3) I've just started Python for fun + heard that it's kind of easy and useful. Good idea or not?

Answer 1

The first thing in order to automate any application is getting to know the processes you want to automate in detail, but you have it covered as a tester so you should be just fine.

1. It's not particularly hard to become an AT, because the second thing is getting to identify the repetitive tasks, the repetitive parameters passed to the procedures, and from there you can design your plan, just think of small chunks here and there, and after that, just get them to work on a pipeline.

2. SQL, Python and Selenium are not particularly difficult to learn, but the implementation difficulty depends on your application's back-end knowledge and source code access.

3. Python is a great choice, just consider that the language used on the application's source code may influence the programming languages that you will end up using due to convenience.

The "pipeline", "source control systems", "DevOps", and "Agile" concepts will become a part of your life like never before, prepare to learn "fancy" stuff that sounds complicated, but are really not.

Good luck Chionae.

Answer 2

Thank you very much for your elaborate reply!