Just last week, I was talking to a friend of mine who is a QA engineer. Like a lot of folks who feel the recent advent of AI will cause a major upheaval in their lives, she is worried too. A huge aspect of her work is manual testing, and she has concerns around how quickly she can ramp up to absorb all the new information. 

Her concerns seem valid. Any news article today will give you a stat on how the adoption of automation is on the rise. If you happen to scroll around on any social media platform, you’ll see countless posts along similar lines. 

This is exactly why I want to take a stab at answering what the future of manual testing looks like. Together, we’ll go on this journey of understanding what manual testing entails and the big question—is it dead?

When it’s manual, it’s performed by a human, mostly without the aid of any tools

Understanding Manual Testing

Testing in software refers to validating the performance and functionality of an application. When it’s manual, it’s performed by a human, mostly without the aid of any tools. 

Let’s consider an example: Say you’ve created a music streaming website, and you have finished the last bit of code for it to be launched. At this point, you would also want to test if all the flows work the way you expected, and that there are no edge cases that you haven’t considered. 

Software is never a single-person game. It’s all about team effort, so while a developer is ensuring the playback works well, another person can test the other work that has been done. This person is often a manual tester. And if you think about it, a lot of the time, even beta users of a website or app can also be manually testing the software.

Advantages of Manual Testing

We’ve established an understanding of manual testing. Surely, there are advantages to the process, so let’s explore some of them:

1. Flexibility

For work-in-progress software, it’s not the best decision to write automated tests in parallel to code development. The software is susceptible to changing requirements and building new product understanding, thus it isn't a judicious choice to spend time writing concrete tests and then keep reworking them.

2. Empathy

A human performing testing exposes the software to ways other humans will interact with it and thus increases awareness around user experience and accessibility issues. Quite often, manual testing helps uncover gaps in product/business understanding and enhances the product.

3. Intuition

There are many test scenarios that a human can be a better judge of. Say something like touch responsiveness on mobile screens. It’s hard to translate “feel-based” usage into automated code.

4. Context

Often, when a manual tester notices something is off, they dig deeper straight away and can come up with a reason for the behavior and a fix in the same process. They are generally aware of the complex interactions between services owned by different teams and can use that context to drive useful action.

5. Accessibility

Anyone with a product understanding can aim at manually testing an application. The low barrier to entry helps provide opportunities to folks who can end up becoming domain experts. As a matter of fact, this can be a good entry step for someone who eventually wants to write code and doesn’t have the right tools in the beginning. 

A tired manual tester can make mistakes, but code performs the same regardless

The Rise of Automation Testing

One of the advantages of automated testing that propelled its adoption was the advantage of batch processing f, where organizations could run multiple tests in parallel, which is like a massive productivity boost. This saved a lot of time and shortened the testing phase of an application.

Regression testing also seemed like low-hanging fruit that automation could solve easily. With the advent of tools like Selenium and Playwright, automation from the perspective of end-to-end tests took a massive turn altogether.

Imagine having robust tests for all parts of your software—frontend and backend. Tests that could even mimic human clicks! The ease of plugging the tests into the CI/CD pipeline also seemed like a massive win for automated testing. 

With further improvements in AI, we now have platforms like Autify Nexus offering features where one can generate tests using natural language processing, which means one can write tests quickly, and also have anyone take a stab at writing these tests. 

They also offer features like “fix with AI,” so that users can have control over failing tests and can choose the course of correction. At this point, it seems automated testing has become a different beast altogether.

Areas Where Automation Excels

This post is not meant to be a glorified take on one approach. We’ve all written scripts to help us with repetitive tasks. That is the simplest example of automation. There are numerous repetitive aspects to testing, and thus people often feel the need to automate them.

Manual testers evolved to learn the technicalities of code and have their own forms of automated tests. Tests that can run without human intervention and provide results on what worked and what didn’t. 

The advantages are obvious—if you want to perform regression testing, to ensure new features do not break old functionality, having automated tests for the existing features would help immensely. Automation also provides an index of speed—something that would’ve taken a manual tester a while to complete can be multiplexed in a CI/CD pipeline and finished much faster.

The maintenance of software is also easier with automated tests, and they can serve as documentation if manual testers leave, where a new tester can use these tests to gain an understanding of the current process.

The Complementary Relationship Between Manual and Automated Testing

It would be unfair to say that modern automation testing is the end of all manual testing. The ease of writing tests doesn’t mean we don't need manual testers. There is a reason platforms like Autify are “Low-Code When You Want It, Full-Code When You Need It.” 

Manual testing has evolved to have tools like Autify in its arsenal. They can generate tests using the “Recorder” functionality by simply interacting with the website like they used to and having tests created in parallel. 

The domain expertise and the human sense come in handy, while also having the ease of code being spun up at the same time. This code can then be altered by an automation tester, if need be. 

Let’s take an example. Say you have a complex business use case that only a few folks are fully aware of end to end. You can use the expertise of a manual tester to record all the interactions and generate the initial scaffolding for tests. And let’s say you now run these tests and spot a locator issue. 

An automation tester can decide whether it's a false negative or not, and then fix the issue. This is a simple example of how both roles can operate hand in hand.

Manual testing will likely expand to include everyone who is a domain expert, such as product managers or stakeholders

What the Future Holds for Manual Testers

While we’ve established that manual and automated QA go hand in hand, I do believe the nature of manual QA testing will change significantly. Manual testing will likely expand to include everyone who is a domain expert, such as product managers or stakeholders. 

Current and future automation tools can help them to generate the initial set of tests quite quickly, although they would need to possess extreme clarity so that they can prompt the platforms to produce better quality tests for them. An automation tester with domain expertise will be everyone’s dream, because they can also fix or enhance the tests produced by automation tools.

There will still be scenarios where automation would be expensive, be that in terms of time or the cost of running the tests. Manual testing will be quite relevant for such use cases. There is a large index of understanding the infrastructure on which the automation runs and optimizing it for costs and latency. This will become a huge area of opportunity in the future as well.

Therefore, I feel the role will not die. It will simply evolve to entail new challenges.

Conclusion

In this post, we established an understanding of manual testing, alongside figuring out its advantages in the overall testing process. We also discussed how the role of a manual tester will evolve with time. We briefly touched upon automation platforms like Autify Nexus that do a great job at bridging the gap between the two worlds and using the strengths from each of them.

Either through the usage of test generation through varied sources like Jira, Figma, or documents, or the fact that you have full control over the code generated, Autify fits into any organization’s structure. Whether you’re a small company just starting out or a large organization with plenty of resources at its disposal, Autify can improve your testing process.

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