Do companies need manual testers in future?

Automation seems to be a hot word right now in the QA industry. I even read in one article that manual testing may be phased out in the future. I almost fell out of my chair. Granted the article was written in a very PRO-Automation periodical.

I could imagine a time where there would be little need for testers who could perform only manual testing, though. I think it would be impossible for manual testing to be phased out; there will always be a requirement for good manual testers. We can't automate for constantly changing software and in some cases we need testers with experience, people who can think as they test.

Shall I put this way? Unless there is an unpredictable artificial intelligence advances to a stage where there is a learning robot which can also make intelligent decisions, manual testers have a future in the test era.

I am not biased to manual testing. In fact, I like to be an agile tester and wish to maintain a level of automation in companies I work for. We can definitely speed up the test process by a certain level of automation. But, we have to understand that automated tests will always run on a constricted set of parameters. There is usually no guarantee that the situation at a customer's shop will fall neatly into this constricted set. It takes a tester's imagination and creativity to cover these situations.

Automation only tests what it is programmed to test (in advance), manual testing might yield results never expected. For instance, while I test for one issue, I suddenly notice a suspicious activity in the some other areas, or an unexpected exception coming from the server, showing a completely unexpected issue to investigate.

You may be surprised and ask me “Why do all the jobsites and current companies call for testers with Automation experience”. Trust me; it’s all pretty much either some general trend or marketing gotcha going on. But while pure automation is not going to happen in many companies, the days of pure manualness is going to be gone soon. Even in my environment, we test web application and we do automation for defect management and performance management. We cant do everything in either way ( manual/automate) because it either may require checking some test results which is difficult to automate or too time consuming to do manual testing in each and every release.

Let me come to the point. If anyone asks me “will manual testers be wiped out in future?”, my answer will be “No”. Manual testing and its continued existence is assured until coding is no longer done by humans.

Manual and automated testing should not be viewed as or/or. They should marry to live happily ever after and to give an offspring of new tests.