Overview

I have recently joined Phoenix Solutions as a Junior Software Engineer in the QA team. I have skills mostly focusing on the developer side but I was enthusiastic for starting my career as a tester. I just know the basics of testing. So in this blog, I’ll outline the obstacles that I have faced during my training as well as after onboarding.

Main Obstacles

Locator Errors

The main challenge which I faced during initial days of my training is to find unique locators. Though I thought it’s easy to copy paste XPath by inspecting the page. But NO!!

  • Elements inside the drop down wouldn’t get selected
  • I was using XPath for everything
  • Not exactly sure where to use get_by_role and get_by_text

Fixes:

  • Started working with npx playwright codegen
  • Learned where to use what (ex: where to use get_by_role and get_by_text)
  • Started debugging with Playwright Inspector
  • While updating the script with accurate locators, ChatGPT really helped (TBH)

Writing My First POM (Page Object Model)

Initially I just dumped the whole code in a single folder which looked like a real mess.

Problems:

  • Repeating same code for multiple modules
  • When something changed in the UI, I had to change everything in multiple places

Fixes:

  • Created individual files for every module
  • Used constructors for defining locators

This helped me structure the code in a clear way and also with reusability. Still not perfect but better than before.

Allure Report – Setup Struggles

Problems:

  1. Installed Allure CLI but initially allure command wasn’t recognized
  2. After generating the results folder, I didn’t know how exactly I should view the report
  3. Even after giving the exact command to open HTML report, it didn’t open initially

Fixes:

  1. Adding Allure to the proper path
  2. Used pytest --alluredir=allure-results and allure serve allure-results for accurate results

Finally saw clear logs and screenshots in the report.

Conclusion

As a fresher, everything felt confusing at first — from just clicking a button using the right locator to figuring out why my tests were breaking for no reason. But step by step, I started learning the basics like locators, then moved to better practices like POM, and finally set up Allure reports to see everything clearly.

It wasn’t perfect, and I made a lot of small mistakes. But I learned something new from each one. I’m still learning, but I feel much more confident now than when I started. Even one small fix is making me feel even more confident. Long way to go but I’m not scared anymore.

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