Test Automation Coexists Well with Manual Testing

Test Automation can help manual testers conduct better manual testing; Ambitious manual testers can learn and grow to be automated test engineers.

In the previous article, I explained how developers and testers could collaborate with automated testing. This article will focus on the collaboration between test automation engineers and manual testers.

Table of Contents:
· Test Automation is not a total replacement for Manual Testing
· Automation Helps Manual Testers greatly
· Make Data-Preparation Automation a Self-Help Utility on the BuildWise CT server 
· Manual Testers help make automated test scripts better
· Manual Testers’ Proactive Involvement 
  ∘ Some Manual Testers Want to Run Automation Scripts themselves
  ∘ Some Manual Testers Want to Learn Test Automation

Test Automation is not a total replacement for Manual Testing

People tend to think that “Test Automation Coach” (my job title) is here to

1. Get rid of manual testing, and/or
2. Train all manual testers to become automated testers.

That is not true. Manual Testing is always required, even in real Agile/DevOps software projects.

In real Agile/DevOps, 95+% software testing is conducted via automation. Some might wonder the role that full-time manual testers play there. The manual testers still perform manual (mostly explortary) testing every day, why? In a real Agile/DevOps project, the team pushes software updates to production on a daily basis.

“You cannot do enough Testing in software” — Zhimin Zhan

As an automated testing coach, my job is to show how test automation can help a team to do software testing (automated and manual) better via automated scripts. As to what level the automated testing can be achieved, it is really up to the company and individuals. The ultimate goal is to “Release Early, Release Often” like “Facebook is Released twice a day” (my company has been achieving pretty much that for all our apps, since 2010). For most software companies, IT executives will be…