- Looking for an Automation Expert.
- Hiring SDET.
- Job opportunity for QA Automation Engineer.
- Referral for QAE – Automation.
Automation is everywhere. Automation experts are in high demand. Nah! Not in high demand, ONLY Automation Engineers are in demand. All job descriptions mention a set of automation tools and frameworks. Interviews revolve around Java, Python, C#, Selenium, UFT, Appium, Frameworks, Algorithms, and what not. Literally ‘Everybody’ is looking for an Automation engineer.
Then who is doing the manual functional tests? Yeah! The same people. Then why are interviews focused only on automation? Or the Job descriptions? What about the QA process? Test techniques? Is everybody in the market doing only automated tests? No, I am not against automation. I strongly support automation, but at the right place like sanity-regression-continuous build. For a ‘QA Engineer’ – interviews should be focused on real-time Test process/techniques/methods/challenges/risks/concepts, supported by some hands-on automation/management queries. What do you think?
Rajeev Vaidya | Software QA veteran. Aspiring data scientist.
Recently I have seen a couple of teams having more automation testers than the manual testers. Coincidently, defect leakage that I observed was exponentially increasing as the phase progress. Meaning, the number of production defects were more than the defects identified during in-house testing. Automation is certainly required to bring efficiency and reducing rework. But we cannot compromise on discovering the undiscovered defects. I do not see a reason why manual tester cannot be upgraded with the automation skills. Such tools require 10% of programming skills.
Pawan Kumar Mohite | Senior Test Engineer at CGI
Yes agree. But there are few Tester who works on both Manual and automation tool but they have much grip on Manual and in automation they might be lacking due to less practice. As we all know whenever tester goes for the interview the interviewer mainly focus on automation which is a big drawback interviewers must judge them on both manual and automation skills.
Jaimin Shah | QA Engineer at Lodestone Software Services
Yup. 100% Automation is not possible. We can automate a maximum of 70%. We definitely need Manual concepts clear to Automate Test Cases. Because if we don’t know what and how to automate, then there is no use of Automation knowledge. Manual is the foundation and Automation is a smarter way to minimize the efforts and get Optimum output.
Gary S. | S3LC Managing Director
The reason for all the questions regarding automation. It is not where you re now that matters it is where the company wants to go. You can automate many things but if you don’t understand what you are automating, then you do not know whether it will work or not.
Anand Iyer | Principal Consultant-Trainer
I understand the problem, but the proposed solution (including other questions to measure testing skills) won’t work either – the reason for that is also my answer to your next question – “then why are interviews focused only on automation?”
It’s much simpler to judge someone on their abilities at automating stuff in the less-than-an-hour window one gets during an interview, than it’s to judge on their testing abilities – perhaps, with the sole exception of test design. Basically, you can’t frame your questions suitably to judge someone on how well they can test, analyze, troubleshoot, observe….I’ve seen people resort to puzzles as a way out, but Nah. That’s nowhere close to a solution because your context matters a lot on testing, and solving puzzles isn’t conclusive of testing skills.
But, wait. All this is no justification for the flawed process. I don’t support it either, but don’t have a solution to it. Well, that’s the gist of it…
