Manual testing is just not good enough.josh wrote:If the whole site is down that isn't going to slip past my manual testers. Surely someone as experienced as yourself knows you can't just stop manual tests, no matter how strong your automated tests are. To me it seems like you're making the argument we all HAVE to do things your way. I'm saying I chose not to.
For starters it's inefficient. Presumably these are billable hours? Computers don't - yet - ask to be paid for their work.
A computer is more accurate. On the site I mentioned, acceptance tests make over a thousand individual assertions. Would manual testers remember to check everything, every time? Not a chance. Machines never make mistakes - unless you tell them to.
A computer is quicker. With automated tests I pretty much get instant feedback at the click of a button. Well OK, not that instant: the unit tests are fast but the acceptance tests take about five minutes. However, that's still fast enough to run them regularly, several times a day, while I'm working. If I'm being very generous it would take ten times longer to do the same tests manually, clicking around in a browser. You'd be lucky to get a full test run once per day and that has a very significant cost. Any new bugs which you introduce won't be picked up quickly and by the time you do find them they'll be harder to fix. There's more code to hunt through and it's no longer fresh in your mind. It's much, much easier to stay on top of things if you take lots of little steps, each verified by a test run.
It's not about "my way"
I don't think I've ever skimped on testing without regretting it later.