Shift from Manual to Automation

In today's market, good QA employees are hard to find. What if you need to do more but still have manual testers on the payroll. There are two options: Lay them off or train them up. Laying them off then means you have to find someone to fill their position who can do the automation but at the same time, all of that valuable product knowledge walks out your door. We had the same problem. We decided to train them up. We didn't have a budget for bringing in training or sending our QA's out to coding classes. Instead we took the few of us who had software development degrees/experience, some free C# tutorial videos, and then setting aside one hour a week, we trained a group of QA's of all ages on how to write automation. I'll talk about the strategy involved and the effort required. I'll provide the a location where the videos may be downloaded. You'll leave with all the resources you need to start your own shift from manual to automation.