Two Reasons Why Manual Testers Should Feel Secure

I hear a lot of angst in the testing community regarding automation and whether or not it will bring an end to manual testing.

To my mind, a job title doesn’t matter all that much. Maybe you have to apply for Business Analyst or Risk Analyst roles because the QA Engineer role that used to be listed for manual testers is listed as something else when you’re looking for your next gig.

In the opinion of someone who’s only been doing this for three years, here are two roles manual testers fill that are invaluable to the organizations they work for:

  1. You inform the automated checks that get written.

  • Even if your firm wants to automate all their checks, most efforts to automate fail. For there to be any chance of success, whoever does the automation architecting will need help when deciding what to automate in what order. Once the architecture is in place, your org will likely go on creating software (that’s what software companies do). That means there will be room for you to continue to inform the automated checks that are getting written.

  • The author of the automated checks can’t possibly keep up with a live development environment and author all the checks they want to. There are all sorts of tips and tricks to coding that the author of the automated checks will have to keep up to date with. Tech debt will accumulate in the suite of checks. Refactors will be needed. While the author of the checks is fingers to keyboard someone will have to be listening to the development team and updating their mental model with the new work coming down the product pipeline. Without context, the automated checks will either: a) fall out of date, or b) diverge from the product. In either case, folks will lose confidence in the automated checks and the org will be right back where it started, wondering how it can publish new software with acceptable levels of risk.

  1. You drive teams to solutions that solve real business problems, instead of made up ones.

  • At every conference and training I’ve attended I’ve heard comments about the tester being the person on the delivery team who knows the product the best. While everyone else is doing their bit to contribute to delivery, you’re tracking what they’re doing in the context of the business and the end user. You understand where this thing will land, for whom, and how they’ll use it.

  • You are a living encyclopedia of the product under test. Not everyone will want an encyclopedia, but do you want to work for someone who doesn’t think a self-updating encyclopedia is useful?