How much manual testing does an automation tester perform in their job?

Question

My manager has a mindset that automation engineers can be appointed a manual or automation project with same level of efficiency expectations. I certainly can do good enough at manual testing but working purely on an automation project since many months, I am not confident about how well I will perform in a manual project. Do big companies keep their manual and automation testing team completely separate or is there an overlap between the two? Is my manager's mindset common?

Answer 1

Hello,

First of all, great question! Manual testing is something that is not often sought after in professional software engineering. In fact, companies invest greatly into preventing it and automating their testing procedures to get to a point where continuous deployment is expected. However, this is not always easily done. For example, you could have a site that requires 2 factor auth which is hard to automate. In this case you would have a few options:

1. Manually test the changes on a regulated basis(once a week or every other week) to keep production code up to date. This would involve going through "sanity tests" which are basically making sure nothing is on fire, then pushing the code through manually.
2. Invest in a workaround to the 2 factor auth for your testing setup, then automate the tests from there.

Option 2 is preferable, but can be a very costly investment and can be considered too expensive for your team to go with.

In general I would say that you should get comfortable with both since manual testing is sadly something that will likely never go away, even though automation is the goal for nearly every software campaign in professional software engineering.