Businesses today:
Prioritize full automation.
Reduce emphasis on manual testing.
However, let’s be honest—automation scripts only validate predefined scenarios. They don’t explore, analyze, or uncover unexpected defects.
Manual testing remains essential for usability, exploratory testing, and identifying real-world issues.
What’s your take on this?
Hello @ramanan49
I agree-manual testing is still essential.
Automation is great for repetitive tasks, but it can’t think like a user or adapt to unexpected issues. Manual testers bring creativity, real-world scenarios validation and usability insights that automation misses.
A balanced approach is the key to better software quality.
A few questions related to this.
What sort of testing are your manual testers doing?
What risks are they covering?
With those risks do they have a bias towards known risk coverage or unknown risk coverage?
How is there testing going to add value beyond good developer testing?
Are they actively focusing their testing towards machine strengths or human strengths?
Have they built up their technical knowledge and skill to allow for deeper rather than shallow testing?
Have they built up their toolset to continue to do testing well?
How important is discovery, learning, experiments and investigation to their testing?
For me when I encounter those professing to be manual or talking about manual testing they will often be doing very similar testing as automation could cover more efficiently which means they will have a bias towards known risks and a scripted approach to testing. They may not even be aware of that bias or aware that there are different approaches and models to testing they could adopt that better suit human strength areas.
It’s quite a strong view that those manual testers may indeed be losing their value and even potentially the association with this may also harm the highly technical, hands on, risk based test engineers that do something very different.
Even this sort of statement “Manual testing remains essential for usability, exploratory testing, and identifying real-world issues.” is very grey and limited to me as it does not explain why manual testing is essential for this and what it brings differently from what suits automation. It may be worth going deeper into the actual differences.
Try answering those questions and then answer them again with regards to your automation testing model and coverage, are there actual differences, are they significant and importantly are those differences of value?
Business may through no fault of their own perceive them to be so similar that the first two points in the post make a lot of sense, if they are not the same though its worth helping business be aware of what they could be missing out on.
Manual testers add value. One of the ways we do this is by assisting organisational learning. I recently wrote this blog post about how testers do this: How do testers assist organisational learning?
More things might be automated with less effort because we have lots of different tools and approaches that are particularly effective for some circumstances. But it’s not about the values of manual or any testing; it’s about the demand. I believe that many companies want to hire fewer manual QA engineers nowadays, even if they actually need them. The market and the industry are changing, so there might be fewer open positions for manual testers partly because the value of quality for business now is lower, and they prioritize their activities to achieve other “goals” when they cut corners and sacrifice quality.