“Is manual testing dying?”, “Is manual testing dead?”, “When manual testing will be completely replaced by automation?”,..

These questions come up very frequently. I see them on LinkedIn. I see them on Quora. I see them on Twitter.

I’d categorize responses I’ve seen loosely in 3 types. Samples below.

• “NO! It’s not manual!!! It’s all skilled and thinking process! What an idiot!”
• “Yes. All testing can be replaced with automation and tools.”
• “There’s much less manual testing needed for a number of reasons but it will never go away completely.”

When I think of type (1) responses I see an emotional charge. I learned that from Gerald Weinberg. The source of the emotion might be feelings of fear, or insecurity, or even superiority. I’m not completely surprised. The same feelings express, for example, recruiters and accountants, – their professions also undergo a disruption, and much of previously manual labor is taken up by the tools.

Personally, I lean more towards type (3) answer with my own perspective. Eventually I took it to Quora. Cross-posting my answer from there.

Yes, manual testing is dying. And here’s why.

Convergence of roles, evolution of skill-sets

See how different species have very similar looks? – They were evolving to fit similar environment.

Also notice that one of these species is no longer present.

(Image source: Pinterest * Artis Natura Magistra *)

Software engineering industry goes through disruption. There are less and less compartmentalized roles where people perform one function.

In testing specifically, the paradigm of manual execution of test case scripts is dying off. Disruption is happening in many ways.

• Test design and execution happen in parallel (exploratory testing)
• Programmers test at the product level, testers review code and write unit tests
• Product owners and business analysts perform testing and deal directly with the programmers.
• Approaches like Agile, DevOps, Lean put an emphasis on the quality throughout the process. The whole team assumes responsibility for the quality at every step of the process. The whole team tests.

And while “pure-black-box-QA-functional-testing” roles may go extinct like those Icthyosauruses, testing – critical thinking and problem solving – will remain and thrive being a common ancestor of all engineering professions.

And here’s ANOTHER thing I would like to die.

– This odd classification of testing as “manual” and “automated”.

If a tester operates the product by hand – i.e. manually – and through the GUI – some people call it “manual” testing. Well, then a whole lot of stuff is “manual”: manual driving, manual calling, manual cooking, manual eating.. even manual recruitment and manual management.

And on the contrast, if code execution or some tools are involved in the process, some people call it “automated” testing. Well, name one activity where tools or programs are not involved to some extent! Nowadays, cars and phones, kitchen mixers and sex toys, TVs and washing machines have programs running in them. Everything is “automated”!

And whenever we use a computer we always use programs and tools.

Now, there’s a specific subset of understanding, related to creation of programs to aid our testing.

• if I use some tool to drive the GUI actions and check some values I might appear “automating” those “manual” test cases.
• if I code API calls and verification of data I might appear doing “automated” testing, in contrast with “manual” operation through the GUI.

I consider this a silly misunderstanding. We may not operate by hand, per se, by we always engage our brains. We may perform GUI operations manually or run a script, but we always exercise our wetware to evaluate the results, and we always investigate “by hand” whenever we need additional information.

There are plenty of products that accept input by other means than GUI – files, database, API. Testing them requires use of certain tools. Some tools are readily available, some need to be coded.

There are also products that accept input in a form of gestures, so operating by hand is implied.

There are also aspects that are too hard or too expensive or too unreliable to formalize with automation, namely usability and accessibility, so doing it the same way as customers will do is the optimal approach.

But any kind of testing always requires using this thing between your ears. There’s no “manual” or “automated” testing. There’s testing; by far, an inherently human activity.

Roles and titles might be different, and there might be no dedicated tester role, what’s important is keeping up the skilled testing function for all people in the team.