Why I Switched my day work from Programming to Automated Testing? Part 2: More Fun

Challenging work brings fun; High Productivity leads to Satisfaction.

Zhimin Zhan
7 min readJul 20, 2022

The articles in this series:

The city where I live is not big, so I sometimes bumped into a few programmers I had worked with or mentored before who now had job titles of “Principal Software engineer” or “Architect”. They were surprised that I came to work as an automated tester (short-time contract, usually I decline renewals). To them, software tester (manual or automated) is a low position compared to programmers, especially for me, an accomplished developer. Some even tried to convince me to take a programming role, but I declined firmly. The reason I explained to them was: “I am just fine with it”. The real reason is: “Automated Testing is much more fun than coding in a typical web project”.

I am not trying to offend programmers here as I am a programmer myself. It is work environment, support and constraints that usually limit a programmer’s creativity greatly (see below). I enjoyed creating software tools such as TestWise (testing IDE) and BuildWise (CT server). With the help of automated End-to-End regression testing, I have had fun developing my own web apps such as ClinicWise, WhenWise and TestWisely. The foundation of all these achievements is solid Automated End-to-End Regression Testing.

Check out this article for detail
Table of Contents:
· “Sweeter After Difficulty”
· High Productivity leads to Satisfaction
· Work with Fewer Constraints
· My Most Satisfying Moments as Test Automation Engineers

“Sweeter After Difficulty”

In the previous article: “More Challenging”, I explained, with quotes from some renowned experts, why Test Automation (via UI) is much more challenging than general coding tasks by most programmers.

Zhimin Zhan

Test automation & CT coach, author, speaker and award-winning software developer. Help teams succeed with Agile/DevOps by implementing real Continuous Testing.

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