Does Automation Testing Mean Death To The Manual Tester’s Role In A QA Team?

While test automation is the future of software testing, manual testing yet keeps its place in the industry, since only 7% of companies automate tests on the mainframe. Organizations are now understanding that to meet the business’ requirement for speed, innovation, and great consumer experience, automating more test cases is very crucial.

Shift from Manual to Automated Testing

While the mainframe remains to play a central part in powering modern digital services, manual testing exercises control the delivery of innovation and prevent organizations from meeting their business purposes. Teams are now consuming more time than ever testing new mainframe code, features, and functionality because of today’s complicated application environments. This can drive companies to cut corners to cope with the increasing speed– resulting in significant unfavorable outcomes. Cutting corners would mean negotiating on the quality, introducing bugs, interrupting operations, spending development teams’ time, impacting consumer experience, draining services team resources, revenue impact, and the list goes on.

Speed and innovation have become the utmost preference for IT departments over every industry as consumer demand for a continuous cycle of new and enhanced digital services and experiences remains to grow. Automation and the shift to Agile and DevOps play a significant role in improving the speed of innovation without jeopardizing quality and efficiency.  

Demands of Agile

Agile methodology, which was once only confined to small application projects and co-located teams of 8-10 members, is now increasingly being adjusted for large-scale project development. It’s vitally essential to pick the right test case management tools when creating a transition to agile, to improve team collaboration, reduce costs, reduce release cycles, and give real-time visibility into the status and quality of your software projects. Pick tools that can combine with other business-critical devices in your development environments such as those that are employed for defect logging, requirements traceability, metrics, and recording, or manual and automated testing. This kind of adaptability and functionality is particularly important in large, enterprise-wide projects that require to scale over several departments, platforms, lines of business, locations, and technologies.

Different Software Test Case Management Tools for Various Agile Testing Methodologies

Acknowledge the uniqueness of your company and choose an agile software testing methodology that completely suits your culture and the skill-set of your development and testing teams. Scrum is one of the several  popular software testing methodologies that uses a highly iterative strategy concentrating on describing key features and objectives before each iteration or sprint. Scrum methodology call for a change within your team, requiring them to begin working in iterations, select a product owner and a Scrum master, build cross-functional teams, regular status updates, sprint reviews and regular meetings for iteration preparation.

Which Software Testing Automation Framework Fits Your Needs?

Simultaneously with CI/CD tools, many agile teams also rely on test automation frameworks composed of function libraries, test data sources, and different reusable modules that can be collected like building blocks so companies can build automation tests according to different business requirements. So, for example, to deliver on the user expectation of a speedy, rich, and easy user interface experience, a team might utilize a particular test automation framework to automate GUI tests. The team is likely to apply a different test automation framework if it’s producing an app for an IoT device that essentially talks to other IoT devices.

Why Manual Testing Will Never Die

Let’s look at manual testing and why it’s still so essential for QA testers. 

Automation Testing Needs Supervision

The chances of running automation testing overnight, things can go very opposite when you leave automation tools alone. 

The big advantages of automation testing come when it is done along with manual testing, or under the guidance of a QA tester. For that purpose alone, QA testers should rest easy understanding that AT won’t be taking over their positions in the foreseeable future. 

Manual Testing Uses Exploratory Testing

When a tester is conducting an exploratory test they are investigating the software without any predefined plan. It’s one of the various popular forms of testing in QA.

Exploratory testing can only be executed through manual testing. The advantage of exploratory testing is that it provides the tester to adapt to their conclusions on the fly, without the requirement to write another test case. 

Exploratory testing also enables for collaboration, theory crafting and collaboration all on the fly. 

As the agile method of development has become more obvious, so has exploratory testing. 

Automation testing requires the flexibility and creativity to be flexible enough for exploratory testing. It operates best in a rigid environment where it knows specifically what to look for. Exploratory testing is the definite opposite – directing the QA tester to go wherever they’d like. 

Manual Testing is Here to Stay!

Continuing with manual testing might appear irrelevant given the advantages automation brings to the table. Nevertheless, the importance of manually completing your tests shouldn’t be underestimated. In some instances, manual testing is more efficient than automated testing, for instance near the end of the testing cycle when initializing automation will take more participation rather than manual execution concentrated on test validation which will appear in more coverage within your test cycle.

Automation also contains errors that can enable misinterpretation. Whereas manually testing your core, critical-path functionality assures that your test case reaches from a user perspective, with no room for misunderstandings. Although automation commences to cost-effectiveness, faster accomplishment, and continuous testing in the long-run, it can acquire important investment costs when starting i.e. 5-15 times as much as the value of your manual testing efforts. Also, some situations may be un-automatable or require human-skills to be dealt with due to the technological boundaries, the complexity of situations, or the resource cost of automating it considerably outweighs the cost of a simple manual test.

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform that is driven by a vast community of tester and QA spread around the globe. We provide end to end software testing cycle and ensure the best results. Testunity works with a mission to bring down the cost of testing without compromising on the quality of the product. TestUnity has expertise in all testing domains and processes. We will help you in getting better and effective testing results without spending much of your software testing. Testunity helps in delivering the project on time and without any bugs or issues without the need to spend much on testing.

Contact us now to get in touch with one of the most efficient software testing company in the world.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.