,
18 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
1. Testers: whenever we speak of “manual testing”, we help to cheapen and demean the craft. There are no “manual testers”—there are testers.
2. All doctors use tools. Some specialists use or design very sophisticated tools. No one refers to those who don’t as “manual doctors.”
3. I would like to see more critical thinking and analytical skill from testers who specialize in applying and developing specialized tools.
4. And I would like to see testers who focus on user experience and domain knowledge become more familiar and comfortable with more tools.
5. But to call the latter group “manual testers” when the key body part is the brain, rather than the hands, makes us ALL look like chumps.
6. No one speaks of “manual researchers”, “manual programmers”, “manual managers”. They all use tools; all do brain- and human-centred work.
7. Yet we permit people to refer to some in our community as “manual testers”. Would a truly professional community play along or stop that?
8. Here are seven kinds of testers: satisfice.com/blog/archives/… To refer to any of them as “manual testers” ought to sound stupid. And it does.
9. On top of all that, the “manual tester” trope leads to banal, shallow, clickbait articles about whether “manual testing” has a future.
10. Instead of focusing on the skills testing *truly* requires, those stupid articles add up to “learn to program” or “learn Selenium”.
11. Learning to program is a good thing, generally. Learning Selenium might be a good thing too, in context. Thank you. Let’s move on.
12. How about we study how to model and analyze risk? More stuff on describing coverage? Other clever uses for tools, besides for checks?
13. “Manual testing” has no future. It doesn’t have a past or a present, either. There is no manual testing. There is TESTING.
14. That testers should build skill in using tools that serve their mission should be completely unremarkable. Yet there are MANY missions.
15. I’ve lately seen WAY too much griping about how hard products are to automate, as though automation were the goal. It isn’t. Testing is.
16. Our goal as testers is to learn about problems that threaten value in our products so that our clients can deal with them effectively.
17. Neither our testing clients nor people who use software divide the problems they experience into “manual bugs” and “automated bugs”.
18. So let’s recognize and admire technical testers, testing toolsmiths AND THE OTHER SPECIALISTS in our craft. They are not manual testers.
