Review of the Year – Manual Testing
Manual Testing is something that seems to be on the minds of many Quality Assurance Managers and Test Leads. Usually they want out of the Manual Testing and view Automated Testing (Blog planned for next week) as the saviour of their budget and time constraints.
However, judging by the vacant positions we get requests to fill, there is still no shortage of Manual Testing positions at least in our area. There are still a lot of requests for Manual Testers with business knowledge preferred and new software and startups still start with manual testing. We get requests for Automated Testing with specific tools usually requested and will discuss this next week.
The part that seems to be missing from many of the requests and the subsequent position is any discussion of the How; What; Why; When; and If; of the manual testing.
There seems to be limited thought given to How the testing is to be done apart from some vague request to build testcases and execute them.
Little consideration is given to What to test and Why beyond the statement: “We need to test the software”.
When and If are not such an issue: Yesterday and definitely are the one word answers to those questions.
These answers certainly provide freedom for the tester to do what they want but that may not always align with all the stakeholder’s wishes and may be 180 degrees off in some cases.
This leads to a poor ROI and a large waste of time and money.
There will continue to be a market for manual testers for new changes and new applications that are not yet mainstream. We expect automation to take over many of the repetitive tasks (as has always been the case) The only open question at this stage might be what AI will do to the industry. That we cannot predict.
Want to discuss the effectiveness of your Manual Testing further? Contact us.