Manual test engineer? You need a transformation!
There was a time when software test engineers were fairly fascinated about the tools and technologies except the testing. They were only testing the quality of application manually and approve or reject the build deployed for testing. There were days, testers used to get enough time for testing. But now the situation is different. They lost their luxury of having weeks of time to test.
Over the period of time, the software development processes have acquired different methodologies and have been followed also. For instance, Agile, Scrum, KanBan, Scrumban or DevOps. The traditional way of software development process is disappeared and these new processes have been widespread. With these methods, the frequency of new builds or deployments has increased drastically. The frequent deployments mean that the software test engineers are getting more and more stuffs to test. Along with the features that are added into new deployment, the test team has to make sure previously working features are unaltered in their functionality. This brings out the tremendous work pressure to testing team in completing all the tests before releasing the product to customer. In some cases, if the new build is not satisfying, then release would be delayed. To overcome this situation, Test team has to bring in the change into their work and speed up the testing. Automating the testing would greatly help the testing team to achieve regressing their application fast and also for continuous testing activities.
Here comes a tough transition time for manual testing team to carry in the transformation. With no other alternatives, unless they change their profession or role, they have to adopt themselves to start learning at least one programming language. This would help them to begin with writing test scripts to automate their software to be tested.
Is it an end of role manual test engineer?
No, definitely. Testers’ acuity about the product is different from development team. They think about the quality in different ways. The combination of a programmer and a tester would make a good “pair programming” duo. Any individual who wants to continue in the industry with competitive skills, one has to get adapted to the changes.
Why need a change?
As per the 2016’s Gartner magic quadrant, by 2020, 50% of enterprises would implement continuous testing with frameworks and open-source quality tool. Also, the current IT trend wanders around making use of digital media and the digital devices such as mobile phones and other handheld devices. The whole world is talking about IoT (Internet of Things). There are thousands of such handheld devices available in the market. Any application which is built to run on such devices can’t be tested individually on each of the devices manually. You need to find out a way to achieve testing your application on most of the devices. Hence, it’s not only that test engineers have to learn to see the changes within themselves to speed up testing activities, but also, to be more skill full, competent and to stay and continue in their career.
Conclusion:
It’s not an end of manual testing. From my perspective, the brand new product or application needs manual testing until the application gets stabilized in its behavior. Furthermore, you cannot expect 100 per cent test automation of a software. In other words, in some cases, how much ever the automated testing is powerful, it cannot replace manual testing. So, industry needs manual testing and humans to conduct that. Having said that, to be more competitive and ready for any situation, the manual tester would have to make a strong commitment to upgrade the skills they possess and be equipped with one leading automation tool in the market.