Testing isn’t all about automation.

Of late people seem to ‘push’ the agenda that developing complex extensive automated tests as the way ensure that quality is maximized and time-to-market minimized. Its time someone asked the tester what he thinks and here it what I think:

An automation framework is a bundle of code. An intrinsically code bundles have a common nature: “They are desinged to do the same thing over and over agian irrespective of the environment they find themselves being executed”.

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Hence by nature that is what code can do for you (be it automated tests or the product itself). Now we come to the question, is that what good testing is all about? Automated tests can do the same thing to the system under test over and over again. Will that ensure quality products?

Albert Einstein I believe said that the height of stupidity is to repeat the same thing over and over again and expect different results. Well i guess thats exactly what we are trying to acheive by doing this. In short the sapience of a tester CANNOT be replace by ‘mechanization’. I’ve been observing teams involved in this senseless activity of spending 80% of tester time in developing automated tests. Im keen to see the results in terms of product quality for the said team.

In the Indian software testing scene there is this trend of considering testers who develop automated tests as ‘demi-gods’. Well after years of having done both sides of the story i think human intelligence cannot be replaced by code snippets to achieve continuous product quality improvement.

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