“Automation is not finding bugs” a question I got,
My answer – “Is automation supposed to capture bugs?”
“I speak clearly, I think clearly” Michael Bolton..
Since often we call it Test Automation, the assumption is this ‘testing’ should report bugs
In reality automation is not ‘testing’, it’s ‘checking’, therefore it will not always capture bugs
However, automation does free up tester’s time to do more testing and capture bugs
The bug capturing will be done by tester’s for the most part, not automated scripts
Not to say automation will not capture bugs at all,
Rather, it should occasionally capture issues and provide confidence in our application’s stability
More on this plus about data generation for automation here:
Automation in testing is used to validate a system is working as expected. It is Regression style testing, which some call Checking, and is used to see if the system has “regressed” (diverged) from expected behavior. It can find “bugs” of regression type and does rarely find new ones (something has radically changed or after investigation of a regression bug it was found to be something new).
Automation in testing is used to determine did we break something that was working before. By allowing a machine to do this task (and at scale) it allows for efficiency gains that allow a human tester to go do exploratory testing which finds the really interesting bugs.
Thank you for adding that Jim, brings a full circle around the topic