Tester Being Tested – Is it possible to survive with Manual Testing only?
Q: Is it possible for tester to survive in testing just by doing manual testing (and not knowing automation testing)?
Pradeep Soundararajan: Have you watched the movie Ratatouille? There are some great words of wisdom from that movie. Here is one : “Anybody can cook but only the fearless can be great” . Paraphrasing, “Anybody can test but only the fearless can be great”. As a sign of being fearless it is never about survival – it is always about being great.
You may only know to cook noodles but you need to be so good at it that the entire noodle eating population wants to eat your food. If you love to cook noodles and there is nobody on Earth who like to eat noodles, you got to create love for noodles before you can cook and sell them. All this requires the skill of “fearless-ness”. In a country like India – fear is taught at schools and colleges. The lessons of fear are further extended at home and by the awesome friends they have made.
So those who fear – irrespective of whether they are in manual or automation – will always be worried if they will survive. It is actually good for the industry that way. The problem has never been with manual testing – the problem has always been with humans and how they do and sell manual testing.
Yes Pradeep. If we are confident on what we are doing we will be fearless and can survive in manual or automation testing.
Manual testing? Well.. most of the testing I do involve using my hands, I don’t know how I’d do without them, but I imagine it’d affect my productivity.
This reminds me of a wonderful blog post: http://experitest.com/did-you-hear-the-one-about-aretha-franklin-the-mobile-testers-2 Such a large part of succeeding the testing world and in the bigger world is about believing in what one does and wanting to improve constantly…
Is there anything but Manual Testing? I mean how can you setup an automation test without first doing a manual one? I am really saddened as of late seeing all these folks out there thinking that Automation is some sort of silver bullet that can fix anything. Please, automation will never catch the edge cases that really matter and are really destructive…
I’m agree with all of your comments but I understand the question too. Here in France all jobs offers come with a request for automation. Like if you don’t know how to automate tests you worth nothing. I assume it’s because it seems more technical than manual testing and that employers enjoy automate things but here we are : it’s very difficult to get a testing job without writing Selenium or Cucumber or others on your CV…