Thursday, January 10, 2013

"Test Automator" - An Indentity crisis...

Are we losing our identity . The identity which derived from being a Tester, slowly growing into the fore of Automation.

Being in the industry for close to a decade now, I am worried about that thought of losing our identity.

Automation began as simple record and play back
Moved towards optimization of same process
Framework showed their head
Entry of custom scripting

Now the march is towards writing tools, customizing tools....continue

I am atleast glad, quite a few (whom I interacted in various forum, platforms have their roots from testing), but the newbies today start with Automation. Is this the beginning of the end of Testers ?

'Testers' not from a mundane manual execution standpoint, but the mindset of finding defects, problem cases and above all being an explorator.

Today's we are driven by two terms "Efficiency and Optimization". This has been successful in turning everything in our industry towards a "Code/Package based world".

I wonder, maybe this is how it began, with simple lines of linear code, no testers, lots of defects. Are we heading to a Deja-vu ?...

Let's wait and watch....

As much as being an Automation consultant, I have always cherished the joy of finding defects when compared to thousands of line of code running flawlessly or a home-grown framework etc.

But hey, what’s the fun, if our automation assets don’t discover defects, wouldn’t we be extinct, guess we already are ...!!!