Automated testing has become more and more popular in recent years and this looks like automated testing is dominating manual testing trade. Doing a quick search on job sites, I find there are a lot of jobs related to automated test and I hardly find job for manual testing position.
While I still believe manual testing will be long-live, this looks like something has changed in manual testing. I’m curious to know if manual testing is dead or what happened to manual testing.
Yes, manual testing is dead.
@Admin, look like there’s a problem with the Poll. I can’t not vote.
Hi Aditya,
Can you elaborate more on your comment as “manual testing is dead”?
Hmm, thanks for reporting the bug. Let’s see if I can fix the problem.
Certainly not. They are still need both manual tester and automation tester. But i would agree that job market now needs the tester who now both of them.
@Quangtringuyen
Re: “But i would agree that job market now needs the tester who now both of them.”
What I observe is that the job market nows need more automation engineers. Check out the job sites and see how many position for manual testers and automation engineer.
Btw, excuse me should I address you as Quang or Tri? I can’t guess from the username…
Yep, i know that. But you know, the automation tester has both of those skills: automation and of course manual. So in the job market, they assume an automation tester should be had both.
Actually, I’m a manual tester and trying to improve myself with automation. Just call me Tri instead of Quang 🙂
@Tri,
Welcome on board. Feel free to update your profile to tell more about you 🙂
I agree with James Bach’s opinion that people is for troubleshooting and problem solving. I’ve also never found my testing as a repeatable task: Keep running the same test case all the time never gives me any new good bug, code changes always demand better approaches.
@Hiep,
You’re right that people is for troubleshooting and problem solving. Don’t forget people still need tools to support them to do job properly.
Why we should care this?
@Thong,
Great question. Why should I care?
To be honest, not all testers cares if manual testing is dead or not because:
* They may not treat their professional seriously
* They may be automation engineers
* They may not know what manual testing is
* They may be very adaptive
I can think more reasons so that someone may not care about if manual testing is dead or not.
As tester we choose the reason why we care something and why not 🙂
Thanks for thoughtful question.
No, manual testing never dead, it’s just sharing the choice with some newer technology.
Do you believe a plane can “kill” a ship? maybe the plane is faster, more convenient, more advantage, but they cannot kill a boat anyway, it’s just the choice & depend on your resource, your money, your testing target & automation (like a plane) can’t replace manual testing (like a ship), I think so!
@Sang,
“Plane and Ship” is an interesting analogy.
One thing I need remind is that the answer can depend more on how you define “manual testing”. If manual testing is just follow steps by steps in scripted test case, execute and update the result, I believe that manual testing is dying and should die because automation is doing great job to handle such tasks.
Manual Testing will never die, Systems will always need some functionality that needs to be tested Manually first before automation is involved especially in the banking industries.
> Some deaths I’ve observed:
>> Manual testers who refuse the effectiveness of applying automation tool in improving coverage, and try to compete with automation scripts on the same test.
>> Automation testers who think they can do exhausted testing (to test every single possibilities) by automation’s computation power.
The manual tester who make use of both computation power and his own critical thinking is the one who wins.
@Hiep,
Very well said.