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Benefits of E2E Test Automation & Continuous Testing (Part 5: to Wise Testers)
With real Test Automation and CT, manual testers will be more productive and have more fun at work; Motivated ones may become automated testers.
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Continuous Testing (enables software teams to release to production daily, unlike fake CI/CD talks. Check out “Continuous Integration at Facebook” and AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading) is the heart of the software development process. It benefits all stakeholders of a software project:
I have full respect for manual testers as I have gained a lot of insight into good automated test design by working closely with these testers as a consultant, programmer or mentor. I have to say, the bad manual testing processes that some organisations forced on the poor manual testers are just cruel.
The Reality
A typical test case design/execution spreadsheet looks like below.
Every time when I see this, the word ‘sweatshop” comes to me. How could we say that we are doing High-Tech if our testers spend most of their time doing these tedious and mostly unuseful tasks day after day? There are many problems with this type of test execution:
- Written Test Steps are often out of date
From my memory, > 90% of manual test designs (Excel style) will be wrong after a while. The decision to create these test spreadsheets (quite a lot of effort) is based on the assumption: the application won’t change. However, we know that this assumption is completely wrong, especially for ‘Agile’ projects.
Some might argue: “if the application changes, we will update the affected test steps in Excel”. Will you really do this every time? I doubt it as I have never met anyone who does.
