Do you feel the traditional QA mindset— including user advocacy, exploratory testing, and critical thinking — can truly be combined with the demands of technical automation such as scripting, test frameworks, and CI/CD pipelines in a single role?
I would love to hear your thoughts. Is it realistic to expect both from one person? Do they balance each other or compete for time and focus?
I would love to hear your thoughts.
Both are important and complement each other.
I’ve maintained test automations + CI/CD pipelines along with manually testing new features.
I guess in 2025 this shouldn’t even be a debate now 
Do we need it? Yes. Have I ever seen such a person in 20+ years in Quality Leadership? No.
But I embrace that reality. In the test space from my experience, there are people that are experts at finding out “what” to test and people that are experts at knowing “how” to test. All the Automation Engineers I’ve worked with have completely respected the skills of a good test analyst as they need them and the analysts respect the automation engineers getting some of those important tests automated so they can keep exploring.
It wasn’t that the one person wasn’t good at the other skill, although in some cases that was true. It was more they felt the other skill needed focus and it wasn’t something they wanted to focus their careers on.
If I there is a Quality professional who loved both manual testing and automated testing and wanted to do them 50/50 all the time, I’d love to meet them 
Thank you for sharing. I’d like to hear how it’s working for you and learn what I can do to make it work better in the future.
Thanks Gary I haven’t really seen it in action yet, so I’m exploring to understand how practical it is and how I can manage both sides, especially when there are high deliverables, frequent changes, shorter sprint cycles, a large team, and a complex system.
Without a doubt, the two can enhance each other if treated with equilibrium. The classic QA mentality makes automation meaningful, and automation empowers that mentality. It’s not a matter of picking one and discarding the other, but rather understanding when to investigate and when to implement. 
As a technical recruiter in the past, it is a hard-to-find combination.
Moreover, even people with it, make it challenging to decide when to do what.
Haveing the skill of mindset rather than the coding skills is more crucial, as it made us decide on the correct actions to take.
Coding is technical; it’s easier to make someone learn that. Especially these days when you have generative AI by your side.
To mentor soft skills, thinking patterns, and creative thinking is much complex, especially when we, as QA managers, are not brain/social mentors in the profession. My ability to mentor a worker to be more creative, more strategic is pretty minimal.
Yes we need to balance them but it’s easier when you have a clear process and strategy to follow up.
For example, you are writing automation tests, you have requirements to cover.
Test Cases design - use mindset, decide which one you can automate and can be reused in the future as a regression, which other don’t make sense to automate.
After doing this split you can wear the automation role hat and code your way the test cases.
Execution phase - run the test.
When they fail - again, you need the QA mindset.
@maithic Both really go hand in hand and complement each other. I’ve worked on automation and CI/CD while still testing new features manually. Automation takes care of the repetitive stuff and keeps things consistent, while manual testing brings that creative, real-user touch automation can’t match. Honestly, in 2025, this shouldn’t even be a debate — a good QA naturally blends both technical and testing skills.
In terms of skillset, yes it is definitely possible. However are you going to grow and become as skilled in one area (automation) if you are also doing user advocacy and exploratory testing? It also depends on the scale of automation needs. Backfilling automation AND testing new features is too much IMO. Equally trying to automate everything is going to take away time from other much needed exploratory, system and user advocacy.
I would definitely say that it is advantageous to have skills in your pocket but there’s a prioritization balance to be made.
Side note: My ideal involves collaboration, not pushing it all on one person/role. Developers (IMO) should do the bulk of the automation but not alone. Collaborate on test scenarios & decide what to automate and what is best done manually. Whilst one role may be better at one type of testing, they should also be able to cover for each other.