Tale of a tester

Tests & trends

Once upon a time I was involved in an international testing team and we were testing a complicated web application for months. I did not move to London ( no way! ), but worked with some guys from the misty, rainy city on a daily basis. You know the stuff: daily meetings, retros, estimations, catch-ups and how-are-you talks. They had the money to visit us a couple of times in the Wild East, which is not that wild, of course and they were fantastic guys. Except their manager.

He was obsessed with the idea of automation. Nothing else matters, only automation! He wanted us to implement every ridiculous, tiny test case he ever saw on the story cards even if it had no sense at all. Testing it manually was much more effective and everyone knew this fact in the team. Still, we had to put a lot of effort to write the code, run it and maintain it under the frame of our precious continuous regression system. 

Why? 

First I thought that he simply wants us to practice the coding. I can accept that, what more, it's a very good idea! Except if the test cases are too simple and you are a senior tester with years of coding behind you. In this case this task can be boring and not too challenging which is a managerial failure. 

But it turned out that it wasn't about practicing. 

It was about trends in testing. 

Yes, you read well. He saw some articles on the Net about automation and how it would replace manual testing. And he became a believer...in a manager role. Bad times are coming...killing manual testing is like hanging on Facebook all day instead of going to meet your friends. You have to find the balance or you are done. 

But this is not about him, actually. It's about the fancy trends in testing. Are you following the trends? If you see a new tool, will you try it out and tell your teammates that this is the future? What do you need to be convinced by a new solution, new process or new tool? When do you say that you had enough and want to try out something new? 

Is the manual testing dead?