About the courses

The courses that I developed arose naturally, either in response to requests or based on a theory and practice that I wanted to share with the world.

The automation mentoring program that I mentioned earlier — what's it for? It's to turn "non-automators" — testers who don't use automation tools — into automators. At some point, we realized that the preparation of a junior and the preparation of a middle-senior, would be more or less the same if they are switching from one profession to another, meaning that the list of tools they need to know is more or less the same. The depth of immersion may vary, but in general, it's the same. So, we started to rewrite the modules that we had on tools, frameworks, and technologies. And when we were rewriting it, I realized that people don't watch two-hour webinars (unless they are filmed by Michael Bay or some respected person).

Version Control with Git

So, we decided to make short videos. We had to rethink the delivery method entirely. We started with the basics, with the simplest thing — that is Git. Why is it needed? When you work with code, you need to store it somewhere. Git is a system for storing text files: code, or others. It all starts with Git, so we made that the first one.

I added quizzes and practical tasks. I had read a lot about Git before, both live and online. I conducted many trainings before creating the course. Everything I had done had to be reassembled completely, though, because the format of online delivery has little in common with the recording delivery format. But it's possible to reuse some things.

Software development methodologies

The Software Development Methodologies course was created to explain fundamental software development methodologies to junior and middle specialists.

What problem were we solving? If a person has no work experience, they still need to understand how everything should work on a project. There are good books for this, as well as articles. There are many of them, all different - some are good, some are not so good – not all of them need to be read.

What is special about methodologies? A methodology is a system described by its creators and authors in certain canonical works. In the course, I give an example of Kent Beck's classic book on Extreme Programming. It's a great book that explains how everything should ideally work. In reality, things are done slightly differently on projects. Not a huge difference, but slightly different. I've never in my career seen a project that strictly adhered to the canonical methodology, as it was designed in the books. People often experience a bit of a cognitive dissonance when they join a project – they see one thing happening, but books or articles say something else. Or they join the project, see how things happen in practice, and then think that it should be the same everywhere and that what they saw on that one project is how TDD (Test-Driven Development) BDD (Behavior-Driven Development), Scrum, Kanban, etc., were intended to be. But that's not the case either.

When creating the course, I relied not so much on my experience, but on original sources that explain how the philosophy of each methodology was conceived. I talk about the basic concepts based on the author's original ideas embodied in them. This will be useful for a junior who has no experience (those who are not familiar with methodologies and have not worked on real projects). It will also assist people who have already worked on projects and understand how things can happen in practice, but who are interested in learning about alternative ways of "cooking" the same product slightly differently. And I briefly, without delving deeply into details, touch on the most popular IT methods - Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, Kanban. I also include Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development, and Behaviour Driven Development.

The result was this short course. It's only 1.5 hours long and can be completed in an evening.

At the end of the course, I recommend three books to read. Reading them will take a bit more time, but I distilled the «true lore» of the relevant concepts.

Maven Build Tool

The Maven Build Tool course was created to help newbies in Java programming build their test projects using a build tool. We chose Maven because it is the most popular and very easy to use. The course's goal was to explain the basic principles in half an hour: how to create a project, connect necessary dependencies, and prepare the project for publishing on Git or GitHub, or join an existing project.

The course is aimed at those who have recently started writing in Java – those who have learned its syntax and the basics of the language but have not yet had experience building large projects and publishing them. The focus is not so much on developers as on testers wishing to become automators and only starting to learn Java programming.

We have suggested using Maven, and carefully putting the work in Git, so that everything is neat and smooth with the projects.

Continuous Integration with Jenkins

The Continuous Integration with Jenkins course is aimed at those who recently started learning programming. Depending on the developer's approach, Jenkins can be either the first or the last stage of the project creation process. In development, there's the concept of "build pipeline" - a sequence of actions from making changes in the code to the release of a new product version. It can be either "continuous integration" or "continuous delivery".

Continuous integration means that with every change in the code, all testing, re-compilation, and integration of components must be done anew. Continuous delivery differs only in that at the end of this chain there is automatic product deployment in production.

Jenkins is one of the most popular and simple tools for continuous integration. The course covers the basics of using Jenkins, including its installation and setup. It provides an in-depth introduction to Jenkins and is suitable for those just starting to encounter the need for continuous integration.

Of course, now many browser versions of pipelines have appeared, but Jenkins is such an old-school thing that you can deploy it on a local host and get creative.

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