A lot of manual tests have been automated, and some say that the manual testing and the other testing modes are no longer valid. But experts believe that automated testing can make QA/traditional testing methodologies even more important. QA is still essential, as is human intervention in some cases, to ensure a quality product is deployed. QA engineers need to be involved in the build pipeline and consult on quality across the entire project lifecycle.
Reason 1: Testing is as only as good as the test
Automation does make some aspects of QA easier, but if the test itself isn’t up to snuff, it won’t provide the desired result. Fully automated QA may result in perfectly accurate yet completely unusable software that doesn’t meet any business needs. Any automation in DevOps needs to be validated for usability to meet the needs of humans.
Reason 2: QA may become more important
Because of automation, more QA work will move to the front end of the software development lifecycle, and CI tools will be made more important for testing. As confidence in CI and automation increases, there is a very likely scenario of organizations using Continuous Delivery for parts of their applications, although it still is not something that is completely reliable. However, the QA role may become more important in technical communities as automation takes over manual test cycles.QA automated tests can prove whether known paths still work or identify new features or code that might have introduced issues. However, it still takes human creativity and ingenuity to explore those paths, and then write automated tests against expected outputs. Companies must continue to employee QA teams, and they need to invest in training and software licenses for the automation platforms, but the benefit is still there.
Conclusion
Ultimately, automation isn’t a bad thing – it saves time and helps focus efforts on more human-intensive processes while removing the low-hanging fruit. It makes QA testing easier for routine tests. But it does need to be taken with a grain of salt to ensure that accurate, useless software isn’t being deployed.