Automation VS Manual Testing Why Old-school Manual Testing Is Vital For Business (Even in the automation era).

by TestFortExpert on 08/31/2017

Automation is going to remove human testers soon. Or not? Benefits of automation testing over manual testing will save this kind of job during the automation revolution and old-school manual testing specialists will have to work for decades. Why so?

Imagine how the nearest future may look like.

Friday, Aug, 20, 2027

Patrick, engineer of self-driving flying copters walks out of his office in the midnight. He puts off his VR glasses and takes a seat in his smart auto. It automatically drives him home while the house robots cook supper and prepare the apartment to the master’s arrival.

Is our reality going to be fully automated like in futuristic novels? Honestly, hard to say so.

Automation has always pushed the human race forward. From aqueducs in the Roman Empire to fully automated car plants in Japan the automation increased the speed and reduced the labor force needed.

Did it take away the jobs? Definitely no. Automation removes the burden of hard mechanic and so-called monkey job and provides people with an opportunity to focus on more specific and creative tasks.

According to McKinsey Institute, every automation era grows global human productivity by 0,4 – 1,6%. Robots don’t take half of human jobs. They just transform the labour market. And this transformation will create millions new jobs. As states The Federal Reserve Data, almost 60% of current jobs in the US are non-routine cognitive. In other words, every decade more people work on creative tasks rather than on routine ones.

Informational technologies is the industry which demonstrates the highest level of automation. Automated search, automated recognition, automated testing and so on. Does that mean that we can forget about good-old manual work?

What is automation?

Quality assurance and software testing are the niches where automation is used widely.

Unit testing, GUI testing and Continuous testing are the fields where automation is vital. The machine is capable of doing routine work 24/7. While humans mostly get tired with “monkey job” soon. Still, there are many other aspects where automation benefit is not so obvious.

Imagine a robot which tests the user interface. During the automated testing process, the machine knows the target scenario and compares it with the existing one.

However, what if the colors on the page clash? Is the text hard to read because of the background color?

It would be extremely hard to automate a test that could track bugs like these. The robot can’t ensure the screen layout meets the visual requirements to be user-friendly enough. These aspects of the user interface still need a person to check manually. And manual testing is not limited to UI/UX tests.

What is manual testing? (and why is it irreplaceable)

A robot can’t think like a human. Meanwhile the alive tester will recognize the problem and propose an improvement. Only human can decide what will be more comfortable for other humans.

Let’s dive a bit deeper into pros and cons of testing. Multi-layer perceptrons which are widely applied in modern time neural networks make it possible to vary the power of the signal between 1 and 0. Thus, the AI can decide how close the decision it made was to the most optimal result. But the AI can doubtedly recognize by itself what is the best result. AI cannot imitate our intuition, inference, and inductive reasoning, while human can.

All advantages and disadvantages of software testing of different kinds become clear when we think about whom is the testing making for. The human tester plays a role of an end user. A professional tester should understand how our subconscious works, and checks whether the software (or a website) meets all the requirements to be comfortable for users. Lifelong experience and special educational programs are the things which help QA engineers to achieve impressive results. Nowadays, the software is so simple that 5-year children easily learn to use it. The most popular applications and websites have 99,99% stability. It became possible with human’s attention to the smallest details. Human enjoy using products made (or at least tested) by humans.

Crowds are afraid of robot revolution and massive job cuttings caused by the automation. Meanwhile, human testers keep on doing their job. And this job will be actual for the decades in the future. Those who run own startups or manage software development process intrust the manual testing process to TestFort’s specialists. But that’s another story.

Thinking about making your app/website bug-free and user-friendly? Our team of 250+ award-winning QA engineers will assist you readily – request quotes!

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