I came across a blog post shared on LinkedIn title: Traditional Testing will be Dead Soon!
(http://www.agilebuddha.com/agile/traditional-testing-will-be-dead-soon/ )
"Gone are the days when manual testing was enough and testing cycle used to take months. Now almost entire regression is automated. Out of that only 5-10% is covered through end-to-end test cases. Boundaries between developer and tester are getting blurred day by day"
What's your thought?
I might be a little late getting to this post but here are my two cents:
People love to declare the dead of something, there’s a morbid obsession with being the first or one of the first to declare something. The author of this article has a misconception of what testing actually is and that ignorance neglects factors that he should consider when stating his case.
1. Unit tests are not performed by testers, they can be, but in general, they’re not. Unit tests are performed in isolation which puts the results you get from them on a specialized section. They’re highly important and still needed, but they represent one aspect, not the whole part of testing.
2. Generalizing that testers need to be proficient programmers is not a general fact. It’s needed in some environments and contexts but for the most part, having an understanding of programming concepts and being technical in other areas is just as valuable.
3. Tests cycles, for the most part, don’t take months. Only in specialized cases, companies spend months or years testing given the nature of the software. This statement uses an exaggeration to state a case for manual testing to be slow, which takes me to my next point.
4. Automation, as perceived by most people, is not testing. For an activity to qualify as a test, such activity can’t have an expected result. This is why most automation solutions focus on regression; Because we know the expected results.
5. Automation can be a great great aid in exploratory testing. Testing is an activity that requires thinking. The progression for testing is requiring testers to dive deeper into the applications and the use of automated tools opens a new set of tests and actions that can be performed by the tester.
6. There’s domain knowledge and usability aspects that can’t be automated as of right now and new features bring new challenges that must be explored.
Testing is changing and is changing right now as we speak. We as testers have failed to be vocal and own our definition of testing as a discipline so a lot of other areas are doing it for us. If testing as we know must die, it will, whether someone claims it or not. This type of talk is just a distraction and instead of claiming the death of testing let’s shift the talk to how to improve it. it’s not about Automation vs Manual, it’s about testing and how different skills bring different opportunities to the table, let’s embrace that. Let’s have more intelligent discussions about our field instead of spreading half-baked ideas.
The discussion should be about better software. That’s the business we’re in.