Life of a Software Tester with & without automation

In a fast-paced business world, software development organizations are always struggling to satisfy their end-users. This struggle is real because users of today are more tech-savvy than those who are running businesses, they can easily make comparisons between different software products and apps as per their feature set, performance, overall product quality, and other criteria. This need of the hour for the best quality product makes it mandatory for software development firms to invest significant amounts in a process that can make sure that the product quality is up to the mark. And the only way out to ensure product quality is to conduct software testing. Software testing is another milestone that organizations have to achieve. It may look and feel like a simple process of evaluating products, however, the real challenges have now started.  

But to carry out a perfect software testing process, a team of qualified, skillful, and curious brains is required as essential. But organizations of today have started treating software testers as responsible for each failure a product encounters after it gets released even after conducting software testing. The life of a software tester is no less than the donkey cart that has to carry tons of weight alone. Although the people behind the development of any product are the major contributors yet they are not the only contributors. Many other factors constitute a good software testing process like software testing tools, the role of test managers, etc. But as automation has blown up the wind of the software development industry, testing is revolutionized to a great extent. Automation testing is now becoming a new norm. Automation has changed the life of software testers as well.

Let’s make a comparison of the tester’s life before automation testing and after automation testing.

Life of Software testers before automation testing 

Before automation testing was introduced in the software development industry, businesses were not even aware of the words like “Efficient” and “Effective”. Efficiency is a key success factor when it comes to software testing and the firms were lacking this key element in their testing methods. Manual testing was in place. Business operations were slow and not up to the mark. As a result, organizations failed to provide a good user experience.

All the burdens of detecting or hunting bugs/defects, managing test cases, duplication of tests, reporting issues, and fixing these issues all were carried out by the tester’s alone. Expecting these all activities to be done by the software testers in a limited period was the biggest mistake of management that lead organizations to suffer. On the other hand, manual testing was just a cost-effective method that’s the reason many organizations invested just in manual testing procedures even organizations usually acquire manual testing services from third parties as well, to not face any troublesome situations in the future. But still, results would not 100% in the favor. 

Some of the major drawbacks of manual testing are as under

• Less reliable testing method because it’s conducted by a human. Therefore, it is always prone to mistakes & errors
• The manual testing process can’t be recorded, so it is not possible to reuse the manual test
• In this testing method, certain tasks are difficult to perform manually which may require additional time in the software testing phase

Some of the major benefits that manual testing comes up with are as under;

• Get fast and accurate visual feedback
• It is less expensive as you don’t need to spend your budget on the automation tools and process
• Human judgment and intuition always benefit the manual element
• While testing a small change, and automation test would require coding which could be time-consuming. While you could test manually on the fly

Life of Software Testers after Automation Testing 

As automation gets introduced in the world of information technology, techies successfully became familiar with words like “Efficient” and “Effective”. Now firms that were developing their software products can better meet their end-users requirements and expectations of the best quality product within a limited period. The burden of software testers is now equally divided with the implementation of tools in place. Business operations become easy and smooth. Software testers would now be able to pay attention to more valuable tasks. Automation testing company need is becoming common in every region and city to facilitate the organizations – those in need of having automation testing services. All the burden on the shoulders of software testers to carry out the testing activities like hunting bugs/defects, managing duplication of tests, test reporting, and fixing the errors on the shoulders of testers have been tackled with ease. Maximum big leakage prevention was no longer a dream for organizations now. But again not everything in this world is perfect. Automation testing was relatively expensive than manual testing yet the results were more reliable than manual testing.

Some of the prominent cons of automation testing are as;

• Without the human element, it’s difficult to get insight into visual aspects of your UI like colors, font, sizes, contrast, or button sizes
• The tools to carry out automation testing are relatively costly than that of the manual testing procedure, which may increase the cost of the testing project
• The automation testing tool is not yet foolproof. Every automation tool comes up with its own set of limitations that reduces the scope of automation
• Debugging the test script is another major issue in automated testing. Test maintenance is costly

Crux

The crux of this article lies in the heart of software testing. There are two methods of conducting software i.e Manual testing and Automation testing, both different in their ways, and both have different sets of fortunes for a software product’s success. Not even a single procedure alone is sufficient for making a software product a great hit. However, the mix of both methods can make sure that humans and tools are collaboratively responsible for the success of a software product. As with the use of tools, the human element is also heavenly important.