Working in an agile environment makes it essential to automate system testing to rerun tests in each iteration. But in the nascent stages of some systems, there are changes in the UI, product flow, or design itself in each iteration, making it difficult to maintain the automation scripts. The role of automation in agile context is repetition of regression and redundant tasks, while the actual testing happens at the hands of manual testers. The creativity, skills, experience, and analytical thought process of a human mind cannot be replaced by automated scripts. This belief has to be ingrained in every organization’s culture in order to achieve the best quality.

Talking about software testing today is incomplete without the mention of test automation. Automation has become an important part of testing tasks and is deemed critical to the success of any software development team—and rightly so, with all its benefits like speed, reliability, reducing redundancy, and ensuring complete regression cycles within tight deadlines.

But the common perception of team managers and policy makers is that automation tools are the complete package for testing activities, and they begin expecting the world out of them. A common misconception is that test automation is the “silver bullet” for improving quality, and organizations start to believe that investing once in an automation tool ends all other testing-related tasks and investments. Managers start expecting everything out of their automation suites—100 percent coverage, minimum run times, no maintenance, and quality delivered overnight. It’s basically expecting godlike miracles to happen! Hence, there arises a need to educate and understand the actual purpose of automation and the importance of manual tests in this context.

Working in an agile environment makes it essential to automate system testing due to the bulk of regression tests required in every iteration. But what makes test automation hard within an agile context is its very inherent nature of constant change. Because the system under test changes continuously, the automation scripts have to be changed so often that they actually become a task themselves instead of a benefit.

As tester James Bach wrote, Test Automation Rule #1 is “A good manual test cannot be automated.” According to this thought, it is certainly possible to create a powerful and useful automated test, which will help you know where to look and to use your manual exploration. But the maximum benefit thereafter will come out of using the experience and exploration techniques.

This is based on the fact that humans have the ability to notice, analyze, and observe things that computers cannot. Even for unskilled testers, for amateur minds, or in total absence of any knowledge, requirements, or specifications of the system under test, people can observe and find a lot of things no tool will be able to.

In a true sense, automation is not actually testing; it is merely the repetition of the tasks and tests that have been performed earlier and are only required as a part of regression cycles. Automation is made powerful by the various reports and metrics associated with it.

But the actual testing still happens at the hands of a real tester, who applies his creativity, skills, experience, and analytics to find and report bugs in the system under test. Once his tests pass, they are then converted to automated suites for the next iteration, and so on.

So the basic job of automation suites is to free up the time and resources of the manual testers from the repetitive and redundant tasks so that they are able to concentrate and focus on the new features delivered and find maximum bugs in those areas.

Therefore, it is very important to not get caught up in the various charts, coverage, and metrics of our test suites. Instead we must focus on our projects’ context and requirements and, based on those designs, our automated versus manual tests ratio.

A simple example to illustrate it would be testing a web form with multiple inputs and spreading across multiple pages. An automation script created for it would ideally open the webpage, input the values and then submit them, and maybe check a couple of validations on input fields along the way. So, the process would ideally be

Observe > Compare > Report

The automation should perform the mostly happy path of a user scenario, observe the behavior as per the set expected results, and inform whether the form passes or fails at the end.

On the other hand, if we perform manual tests on the same web form, we should try to enter the inputs in a different order; navigating to and from the pages and observing whether the inputs are retained or not; and looking for usability issues such as difficulty in locating the fields and navigating buttons, the font being too small or not clear in some setting, or form submission taking so long that some performance benchmarking might be required.

Perform > Analyze > Compare (with existing system, specifications, experience, discussions) >

> Inform (and discuss) > Recheck (if needed) >

> Personal Opinion and Suggestions > Final Report.

It shows that though the web form could have been easily tested by the automation test suite and been passed by it, we might miss out on other valuable aspects if we skip the manual and experience-based tests.

Markus Gartner, author of the book ATDD by Example, summed it up nicely when he wrote, “While automated tests focus on codifying knowledge we have today, exploratory testing helps us discover and understand stuff we might need tomorrow.”

Automation test suites, though essential, should not be thought of as the “silver bullet” of quality. The actual test efforts still lie with the manual tester’s expertise and skills, without which actual quality cannot be ingrained into the system. We must keep a check on the unrealistic expectations for automation tests, because after all, automation suites are not God!