When non-tech people hear ‘automated’, what does that mean for them?

From past 100 years history, Automated = losing jobs. In testing however, that’s not completely true. Here’s why:

In other industries remedial and repetitive jobs are being automated rapidly, blue collar jobs.

Like car assembly lines, bank tellers, until recently driving cars / trucks and making Pizzas.

With AI and ML, some white collar jobs are also a target e.g. radiologists.

However with testing, actions to ‘test’ a software are not always as simple.

It’s not just a matter of performing some steps from a test case,

It’s more about collaborating, discussing and clarifying requirements,

Challenging the understanding held by different groups and figuring out what the business really needs,

Talking to different groups and communicating the AUT’s actual response.

There are a lot of activities involved in this, especially collaborating and reasoning with people,

Which are not based on a set of principles we can script in advance.

While that does not mean automation tools will not be used (more in the next post), I feel they cannot replace testers.