Outdated belief #3: Manual testing is superior to automated testing

There are few topics in software development that can get people going as much as testing and quality assurance. The notion of shipping low-quality code to customers feels like a humiliation to most engineers. It causes a perception of abusing the customer for testing purposes, which doesn’t sit right and to many feels like a way to get disrupted really fast.

Although everyone agrees that software needs to be tested and be of sufficient quality before shipping to customers, the discussion is often concerned with how to achieve that desired state. Interestingly enough, there still is a significant group of people who believe that manual testing at the end of the development process is superior to anything else, including automated and continuous integration and test.

My observation is that this opinion is based on, at least, three misconceptions. First, many seem to think in waterfall concepts where requirements, design, development, testing and release are performed in sequence. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to test before you’re done with development nor does it matter that the code quality drops during development as testing will happen afterward anyway.