HomeAuthor InterviewsInterview with Waweru Mwaura

Interview with Waweru Mwaura

Waweru Mwaura is the author of End-to-End Web Testing with Cypress, we got the chance to sit down with him and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.

Q: What is/are your specialist tech area(s)?

Waweru: Software Development, QA Automation Engineer

Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?

Waweru: I reached out to Packt offering to write my book with them after reading online reviews, then got in touch with Nitin. My motivation for writing this book was not finding a book that provides testing examples and exercises and offers knowledge in a practical development setting both in a testers and a developers perspective.

Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?

Waweru: I use Cypress on a day to day on my job, prior to writing the book, i had been using Cypress for close to two years, i did research on a chapter by chapter basis and basically spent about two weeks just refreshing my knowledge and understanding more concepts before i started writing the chapter..

Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?

Waweru: A major version upgrade of Cypress was released, i had to re-write some sections of about 3 chapters. It was both challenging and interesting as i had to either decide whether production was going to proceed with three outdated chapters or rewrite the sections that were affected by the Cypress major upgrade.

Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?

Waweru: My motivation for writing this book was not finding a book that provides testing examples and exercises and offers knowledge in a practical development setting both in a testers and a developers perspective.

Q. Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?

Waweru: Readers should consider this book as it introduces the concept of practically testing while reading. the book provides rich examples that the readers can learn from and exercises that the readers can practice as they go through the book.

Q. What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away from the book with?

Waweru: 1. Cypress is the new fun way of testing, all you need is to install the package and just worry about the tests, nothing else.

2. Cypress bridges development and testing and is not only a tool for testers but developers too.

3. Cypress is fast, way faster than any other tool that uses Selenium WebDriver

4. Cypress is easy to learn and can be extended with third party tools such as visual testing plugins.

Q. What advice would you give to readers learning tech? Do you have any top tips?

Waweru: Keep learning, don’t believe that there’s any single tech that exists to solve everything, always be open to change and agree to the fact that good engineers are ones who know that their designs are not perfect and the goal everyday is to make them less imperfect

Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?

Waweru: https://medium.com/@wawerumwaura

Q. Can you share any blogs, websites and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning?

Waweru: https://testautomationu.applitools.com/

Q. How would you describe your author journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?

Waweru: It has been interesting, i loved how professional the whole process was, i loved both my reviewers Sofi and Rakhi, they just made life so easy.

Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?

Waweru: Yeah, (Ministry of Testing, TestAutomationUniversity(Tau), developerish)

Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?

Waweru: I just read a lot of tech news and tech blogs

Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?

Waweru: I just followed the plan and made sure not to fall too much away from the chapter delivery deadlines

Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?

Waweru: It takes a lot and commitment is what keeps you going past the 100th page.

You can find Waweru’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here

End-to-End Web Testing with Cypress – Available on Amazon.com