Why would you automate, in testing, everything?

A bit of context:  I was trying to answer a question Michael Bolton put on the Rapid Software Testing Slack chat group, the question was “Why would you automate anything?”. Yes, it was the word “anything” not the word “everything”. In trying to respond to the original question I answered also to the question from the title of this post. In my head was a mixture of those two different words, strange…

Below are several reasons I spot it about why is this desire to automate, well to automate everything :

– some managers does not have a clue what professional testing is ( by professional testing I mean Rapid Software Testing a Context Driven Methodology). The managers still think of it in manufacturing terms(” automate as much as we can”). And because of this then they want a way to speed up things. They see testing as tangible stuff. When I say management, I’m not referring only at the first level, but at all levels in an IT company;

– some testers who are not aware of their profession. Is a trend now with (using) tools, who encourage this. It seems the marketing promoting the tools is doing a good job. And novices (we should not confuse years worked with years of experience) think this is the way. Then with the help of uninformed management we arrive at the desire to automate everything. Somehow these testers are not aware of the misinformation they are doing, is not an  intentional thing;

– some testers who see the trend( the dominant thinking)  and for their personal advantage go on this path. They don’t care about the interest of the project. This is sick and a unprofessional behaviour which I witnessed several times;

– some programmers who are ignorant of what a tester really does. They think, because of their arrogance, that are too smart to need a tester or to respect him/her. For me this enters in the unprofessionalism behaviour;

– some programmers with good intentions seeing the benefit in automation but trying to make a general rule without having other thoughts. For sure these are not senior/advanced developers. I say this because a real senior/advanced developer knows the plethora of the possible problems and they shut up and think, holistically, before speaking/making a decision;

– a teacher/mentor/manager making their people to think about what it means to automate everything. I can extend here the idea that a tester/programer might do this do investigate/search/discover more about this topic.

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