The Hazy Divide Between Manual and Automated Testing

“Are you a manual tester or an automated tester?”

I’ve heard this phrase or something like it for most of my career. In many organizations, there’s some kind of distinction between manual testing and automated testing. In some cases there may even be different roles for manual testing (“QA Analyst”) and automated testing (“Software Engineer in Test”). Much ink has been spilled on whether this division is helpful or not, so I’ll simply mention that this distinction exists in some form in a lot of places.

Something I’ve noticed is that this distinction is getting more blurry all the time, in ways that I didn’t expect. Of course this has been true for a while but things like machine learning are highlighting the haziness of this divide.

Here’s something I did today that really drove home this point: I opened up a white boarding app wanting to see if I could make a mind map. I couldn’t find the actual controls to create one, so I typed in “Create mind map to test email” into an AI prompt, clicked a button and - poof - a reasonable mind map was created with branches like Security testing, Performance testing and so on.

The basic creation of a “manual” testing skill, creating a mind map to test an area of software, has been automated to some extent. Perhaps the manual is becoming the automated.

I’ve seen “automated” testing is being automated with things like low-code and no-code tools and code generation tools. While complete test code generation fully replacing SEIT work is I think a computer science research fever dream, these tools for test automation have come a long way. Now imagine an individual on a team who can operate both manual and automated testing via automation, which is not an unlikely scenario.

Also note that there’s nothing to say that someone without a job title including “quality” or “test” could use the above tools to do their work.

The wide gap between manual and automated testing is closing. What happens next could be anyone’s guess.