A journey which is fruitful and that never stops....

Today I thought about writing the journey that I walked and would love to share some of the unforgettable milestones of achievements that was achieved in this journey. There are many people that I would love to thank and cherish their help which greatly contributed to the success.

The main thing that greatly contributed to where I'm today is my attitude, of never give up and always strives to the climax in my career. Climax in the career is not achieving working in a big organization and being in higher designation. Its not always. Success comes when we reach to the top in our knowledge and also by helping others to the community. Today I never stop in my research and being positive technically, with a can do attitude is the one of the pillars of success. Today I really do my best to strike a balance between work life and personal studies, which has given me great opportunities. Its great to work in an organization which gives an experience in our career, but depending only on the organizational work will never grantee that we know everything. Our organization gives us some challenges to excel but that is a niche of what we need to learn. I truly believe that personal learning is a great investment which helps our career to grow in the long run. Being professional I used to invest at least 2 hours on my personal learning. This initiative that I took had helped me a lot to learn many new things in the Quality Engineering industry today. I always goes through blogs and articles which covers what is happening today. It updates my knowledge a lot which enlightens me where the current industry is. My vision and objective that I have set within my self has helped me a lot. My vision is very simple - Learn, grow and reach to the highest peaks in career and create a knowledgeable community. My objective is to learn a new test automation tool, framework or a technology each day and contribute that to the QA community globally. Everyday I researched something new and achieve something new. Everyday when I look at achieve something new, I used to think in a what if manner. This thinking nature has allowed me to create new and exciting master pices in test automation tool and frameworks. My investment on personal studies and research was showcased greatly in the recently concluded Agile Testing Alliance Global Test Retreat, where I did the best lab session and won the 2nd place for the leadership award. There was a huge effort behind this and my personal research was the huge success to achieve it.

For this testing conference I submitted 25 research papers and brought my organization Codehouse to the third place in the leadership points board.

At the beginning I strived my organization to be number one, but some how brought it to number 2 with my achievement of best session in the conference. We should work reaching the starts, which will enable us to reach the success.

Another opportunity that I got through with my research is learning Katalon Studio and excel. Doing so many new things with Katalon Studio helped me to go on a step further where the first global Katalon workshop was held in India and being a speaker for the event.

My journey and efforts also gave me other opportunities to excel. One of the awesome achievement in my life is to chair as an adviser to the agile testing alliance, which is a global organization, dedicated to develop agile testing practices globally.

Continuous research and learning also helped me to be a speaker for three session in the Selenium Summit held this year, which was great conference on test automation.

1. Speaker session for Selenide in BDD
2. Lab session for different test automation reporting frameworks
3. Workshop on BDD with web services

I sincerely thank Aditya Garg and the ATA team for giving me such a great opportunities in life and creating a platform for everyone to learn and excel.

This was no possible if never initiated my part of learning new things apart of my work-life.

Next my journey is all about helping the community to learn from my findings and experience. I thought of not just giving it to my country but the global community itself. So I initiated many ways to reach test professionals in the industry. One way of reaching and helping is to write articles, where I was able to complete 140 + articles on test automation, which was a huge assert for the test automation readers globally

I was also able to publish an article on the Test magazine UK which is the global test magazine on testing

Next I though of people who loved watching videos and learning. Some love to learn while watching video tutorials. So I started my own YouTube channel called Global Technical QA which have 100+ videos on test automation, most of the findings that I did in my research.

The next thought that came to my mind is to be more practical and give away my research code, integrations and findings directly to the community so they can play around with it. So I have shared all the codes in GitHub which allows community to pull them and study around the ideas that I have implemented. Today the number of repositories in the GitHub has grown nearly to 120 repos.

Meetups was another way I able to contribute my efforts to the community. I have carried several meetups in Colombo as well as aboard. Most of the participants learned a lot from my findings and appreciated conducting these meetups free with Agile Testing Alliance and Colombo Technical QA meetups for free.

So the success is contributing what you know and have learned with the community... The effectiveness of these initiatives come when there is lot of good feedback. The feedback from the global test community, which really helps us to know that our efforts are fruitful.

But there is another crowed that I would love to give my sincere thanks. They are Azfar Sajid who was my test automation manager at Pearson. Who really planted the seeds of this fruitful tree. He was there to advice and guide me on test automation and gave me ability to success on my talents. I would also love to thank Nuwan Karunarathne who is truly a great leader and who really encouraged me to success along with the passion on technical testing that I have. He encouraged me to excel on opportunities and gave me a great guidance how should I strive in my journey. Chathura Vidanagamage and Lahiru Waduge, who were two great leads during my engineering days at Pearson who gave me ample opportunities to grow.

My next moves...with my strong vision and objectives which I have set. My next move is to bring up three test automation tools for the community which are more unique in nature. They are Kiwi, Raccoon and Hedgehog which may create the next level RPA. Kiwi work has already commenced and would be releasing to the community by next year. My next plan is to write a book on test automation and release in March 2019, which will be digital and given away to the community.

So there are few lessons that I would love to give to the community as a take away from this

1. Always strive to the climax of your career, reach the best and do not stop
2. Do not try to follow others, your sucess will stop if they stop. So get up on your feet and move in your own path.
3. Do not let others put you down, disasters happens, take them as a challenge and move more strong.
4. Give to the community while you are travelling in your journey. Your success comes when others also excel.
5. Invest on your personal studies, its truly a long term investment and there are lot of great returns. Strike a balance between work-life and personal studies.
6. Try to be non replaceable and unique, it will help you to be at the peak of your life and demanding at the long run.