Yet another "imminent death of manual testing" post
A fellow tester, Brijesh Deb, shared this post recently:
https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/brijeshkumardeb_testing-nothingcalledmanualtesting-understandtestingbetter-activity-6632017014217072640-6Ui8
The screenshot he included had a lot to unpack, which meant I hit the character limit for posts. It was a nice warm-up for my brain today.
1) How do they define "manual testing"? Did they give that definition to survey participants? If so, what is their definition? If not, how do they know respondents mean the same thing when they choose that option?
2) The header on the image says "Manual Testing is the Leading Cause of Longer Test Cycles". I see 3 other causes in the survey results, all around testing, but what about other causes? For example, how many respondents are in environments where testing doesn't happen until the end of the iteration (eg. Waterfall, or Scrumfall)? How many respondents are in environments where developers don't apply many (or any) tools and techniques to help improve code quality?
3) The header on the image says "Manual Testing is the Leading Cause of Longer Test Cycles", and the sidebar says "Through proper strategy and prioritization, manual testing can be minimized." I still don't know what they mean by "manual testing", but I agree that a good strategy (including both strategic and tactical prioritization) can help make testing efforts more efficient.
4) The conclusion says "Manual testing is avoidable and solvable". Avoidable? Maybe. Certainly, every project needs to decide how much testing effort will be applied, and that might be zero. Solvable? That assumes that "manual testing" is the problem. Their opening statement Manual Testing is the Leading Cause of Longer Test Cycles" tells us that the problem is "Longer Test Cycles". Reducing testing of any kind might reduce test cycles, and there are lots of other ways to reduce them as well, without necessarily sacrificing good testing.
Over the last decade, I've seen so many headlines announcing the demise or imminent end of "manual testing", and frankly it's a bit tired. I get that the ISTQB is trying to make some money from this idea, but considering that this prediction has been repeatedly made and never come to pass, I suspect this one will likewise dissolve into nothing.
Leading the Charge in AI Innovation: Transforming Businesses One Algorithm at a Time
4 年Every 'manual testing is dead' story reminds me of an incident few years back that happened at work. So 2 team members were arguing on how to test security, one was insisting on automation and another had made up his mind that manual was the best way. Few hours in, they couldn't settle the dispute and as a team we decided, that both of them will do a proof of concept, and then we'll assess which method to choose. The tester doing manual jumped into the code and within 2 hours? found out that editing a cookie content, opened some a real serious security loophole in permissions of the app. The colleague doing automation assessment brought in a tool, learned it quickly, configured it, scanned the app whole day - and no result. There were some lessons to learn there: 1. Manual testing is an art, and it's not going anywhere anytime soon. But a lot depends on context, if we talk of repetitive functional testing, then yes, repeating same set of steps is waste of time. But repeating same set of steps != Manual testing 2. Automation doesn't replace user experience testing. You need, on a regular basis, to 'feel' how the app / page looks or interact with you. More subjective the outcome, more you need to rely on manual. 3. "Manual testing" covers huge amount of ground to be looked as a 'delaying' factor. Again context (security, functional, or smoke testing) and where you are in a development cycle depends a lot.? Instead of generic 'manual testing is dead' posts I'd love to see more posts on 'This is where you can kill manual testing, and this is where you should never try to implement automation'. That's where we enter into much needed debate of creating an automation strategy (something we struggled for years as a team).?
Infosys | The Test Chat | Empowering teams to master their testing capabilities while propelling individuals toward stellar career growth.
4 年Thanks for the mention Matthew and you've brought this out so well. Very enlightening. Thank you for sharing
Quality obsessed and Agile enthusiast professional / Freelance hands-on software testing specialist and test coach / Blogger / Interpreter / Catalan Proofreader / Radio host / Humane Technologist
4 年Although my comment on that post (https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6632017014217072640?commentUrn=urn%3Ali%3Acomment%3A%28activity%3A6632017014217072640%2C6632051167377661952%29) was much shorter than your enlightening article, it looks like we are on the same wavelength, Matthew. And this is somehow relieving, isn't it?