The Changes #1: Attempt To Replace Manual Testing

When it comes to Testers, we have hired some fairly non-technical people as “Manual” Testers, but then on certain recruitment drives, we have hired “Technical” Testers which performed manual testing but also have the scope for Automation testing.

When we announced that we would soon be starting projects that will build our next product, managers stressed the importance of defining new processes and upskilling with new programming languages. Moving into the “new world” where you expect things to be automated; there isn’t much need for non-technical people.

I did warn one of my Tester friends about this – that his days could be numbered, but he didn’t listen. He waited for several months, and then seemed to think “damn, I’d better get learning because there is literally no work otherwise“. Meanwhile a few people requested a promotion so they can be a manager, which is unfair really; but there’s always people that benefit from restructuring.

Anyway, another year has gone by and the projects have been a disaster. I don’t think they really went through with their “no need for manual testing” approach, although some people did move back to support the existing product to do manual testing on a familiar product.

In comes a new CTO and a new Head Of Development, and now, yet again, their new idea seems to be 100% Automation. 

I expressed my concern to my manager. It didn’t go to plan last time, and you may find that some manual Testers simply leave the business since they have no plans/desire, or might not have the ability – to do automation.

Earlier in my career, I used to do manual testing and it soon became a tedious and boring job. If you actually find people that do it for a career, then they are probably worth keeping around. In my opinion, you always need manual testers.

Another thing is that you are assigning an inappropriate job title to those people. The automation testers have the weird job title of “Developer In Test”. If you are currently a non-technical, manual “Senior Tester”, how can you suddenly be a “Senior Developer In Test”? This implies that you not only have technical skills, but you have achieved Senior level in it. It’s a joke. Demoting the Senior to the basic “Developer In Test” would make sense but would probably cause them to be disgruntled and leave.

When I previously wrote about job titles, I used Colin as an example. I’d say he was an underperforming Developer, but got promoted to Senior. Simply calling him a Senior doesn’t mean he has better skills. Then another couple of years pass, and somehow he gets promoted again to Principal Developer. I wasn’t happy about that, and questioned my manager. He could only explain it as “we had a vacancy and a strong need for a Principal in the team”. But if Colin was already in the team, what good does promoting him to Principal do? He doesn’t level-up like a computer game character and gain extra productivity, coding skills, code reviewing skills and leadership. We needed to recruit externally to add another person to the team, but also increase the skill level.

So with these new changes, I asked my manager, “why are we changing job titles?” and he said “we are following a new Agile framework that the CTO is implementing”. Surely we can still follow the framework without copying job titles word for word? All it does is cause some staff to be disgruntled.

When another manager was explaining the team structures, he said

“there’s a thin line between “Software Engineers” and “Developer In Test”

Manager

He said that means that Developers can help Testers but then seemed to struggle how to justify how Testers can help Developers – because it turns out they aren’t actually the same.

Conclusion

1. New managers like Heads of Departments or CTO’s love making changes.
2. 100% Automation is a dream. I think you always need Manual Testers.
3. Changing job titles can cause people to become disgruntled.
   1. It could feel like a demotion.
   2. It could feel like more responsibility for the same pay.
4. Assigning a job title to someone automatically doesn’t give people those new skills.
5. Testers don’t have the same skills as Developers.