In Dev we trust; But QA brings The Data !!
Pic Source: Google Images
Today I would like to write about role of a QA and Testing and especially Manual Testing which some say is loosing its significance against. Automation and Automated testing.
I am not against Automation or Automated testing they serve a lot of purpose and are great tool for doing day two day mundane tests, sanity tests , API tests and such more things where input and output is more deterministic in nature.
The places where we need to verify a software for human machine interaction I still need to see a solution which does this accurately and deterministically may be it’s already there but I never got opportunity to work on them.
Wherever we need to test a piece of software where humans interact with it; IMO there is no deterministic way of knowing where, what and how they will interact is very difficult to have a pin on it.
We may guess and implement debouncing, throttling and more in web domain but still may not able to meet the required safe guards to save our application and infrastructure from unforeseen flood of interaction or a malicious interaction.
The necessity of manual testing is not limited to applications which require human machine interaction or web domain.
It is also required to catch a bug in code causing undesirable and software bug manufactured human interactions (In one of the software we wrote we designed to capture “mouse hover” on a particular web element on an application by user and sent an event to our backend systems; an inherent bug in software started sending this event for each hover and they were innumerable)
Such issues may also appear due to bug in well respected libraries if you are interested read this;
https://mixpanel.com/blog/codeless-analytics-problems/
All these and more may missed by automation as we never wrote automation to detect and flag this behaviour.
A good QA with expertise and attention to detail can be our Saviour !!
I also know there is lot of work going on in web domain to automate this thing using Headless Browser , Puppeteer etc see here if you are interested;
https://youtu.be/lhZOFUY1weo
There are lot of a-ha moments in this awesome talk.
But till you see happening in your world embrace manual testing and more importantly embrace a QA specialising in Manual or Automation. IMO QA job is hardest and good QA must give you bad news and sleepless nights and that’s his / her job.
And;
That prevents one getting Slack messages @ 1 AM :)
When QA Gives Go We hit Prod!!
About the Me:
I’m a Computer Science Engineer; I love to and attempt to write about; Humans and Philosophy, Poets and Poems, Artists and Arts and Humans and Computers; all together, all intermingled, all united as an unison like a Beethoven Symphony.
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