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Anyone can execute a test case, but not everyone can test

This post will tell you what I think about testing and test automation in general. I posted this on my Facebook last month but I just want to take note of it here as well.

Article that inspired me to write this: QA Career Path: What You Need To Know!

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Anyone can execute a test case, but not everyone can test!!

Excerpt from the article:
Numerous individuals are not comfortable with the professional growth prospects that are accessible in the software testing field. A few myths in the industry identified with picking Software Testing as a career are,
They are ridiculous as they sound:
- Development is superior to testing career. As anybody can test.
- Just the people who can’t code pick software testing as their career path.
- Pay rates will be less in software testing in contrast to software development.
- There won’t be any future growth in the software testing profession.
But all this isn’t a reality at all!

I admit that I also had these thoughts when I started my career on software testing. I don't have an idea about software testing since my college course focused on programming and I only knew about testing when I started working.

From my experience, I came to know that those who think too little of testing that are in the testing field fails because they don't even understand the concept and importance of testing. They thought it's simply something as following a test case. They never put effort to understand the business purpose and impact of the application itself and the specific functionalities so they only focus on one direction when testing. They never put effort to understand the technologies being used in the application in order to understand how it's made (and how to break it).

Then there's also testers in test automation field. It's good to be able to apply and develop automated test cases but I hope they and/or the company doesn't treat manual testers less than everyone. Manual testing can still be better than automation since they are able to explore more on the application and check corner scenarios, and is proven to have higher defect detection than automation. Also for test automation, it has to be done well in a sense of the test scripts should really be testing the application. I've seen many automated test cases that seems to be navigating only in the application instead of testing it. Test automation testers should keep in mind that they are testers first before being a technical person. The most important output is a working software, not the test automation coverage %.

I hope everyone in the testing field realizes how they are as important as the development team. Be proud and happy testing!

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