A human thinking effort is valuable. More so if it is Critical Thinking. When it is lost in mundane, repetitive work, it becomes marginal. This creates toxic cycles during your so called manual testing effort.
Critical Thinking – 1
The word “manual” in manual testing is misleading. Every testing effort needs a tool. Ex: To document your tests you need an Excel sheet or a tool like Jira. If I would use the word manual, I would mean thinking or I would just call it testing. If a Tester, started being more exploratory, exhausted various heuristics, identified biases, it is a major value addition.
Critical Thinking – 2
Biases? they can uncover major risks. Ex: Your legal department can decline a release approval. This is because the feature or its testing method will lead to a lawsuit.
I have already written about “false dichotomy” in one of my earlier blogs here
Critical Thinking – 3
Bug reporting needs to be questioned for the choice of words used.
In many places, looking at the current scenario, I would like to say that testing effort needs to be slow. It should be logical and based on authorized data. Don’t just buy into test automation. Refrain from asking your testers to rush through a set of test cases. This often means tons of them completed in a single day. It also involves urging them to finish within a few hours, just to have time for themselves. This approach renders the effort meaningless when the tests are written by someone else.
Let us know what your thoughts are about this, in the comments below.
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