Unfortunately, you've left out some of the details necessary to answer
your question. The big two big questions are:<p>(1) What are you testing? (e.g. hardware?, software?, firmware?, ...
--and more detail is better)<p>(2) What are you trying to automate? (e.g. an oscilloscope?, a Logic
Probe?, network throughput? computational load? memory usage? algorithm
efficiency? a software bug test suite to find regressions? ...).<p>Other useful questions are:<p>(1) Does your company do experimental/research work?<p>(2) Is your company using "Agile", or "TDD" (Test Driven Development),
or some other organizational methodology?<p>(3) What are your constraints? (e.g. do you need sub-millisecond timing
resolution?, are you limited to particular interfaces/buses like Serial,
GPIB/HPIB, SCPI, PCIe, USB, Ethernet, ...?, do you need to use
emulators?)<p>(4) Does your company have an existing test regimen?<p>(5) Is your middle name Tim?<p>OK, that last one more than just a joke; it's actually a trick question
and it serves a point. The best test design and automation engineers
I've known all have a real knack for doing the unexpected --You can
often find bugs by doing unexpected things.<p>Whether it's called "Test" or "Quality Assurance" or "Total Quality
Management" or whatever, the field is absolutely huge, and it can be
extremely fun and challenging.