Automation for a tester (a good one) should not be guided by the Continuous Integration(CI). I expect that tester to do the job regardless if he/she will use some tools. To do/use whatever ingenious tool( or approach with tool) he/she considers fit, and not to be limited by CI and Continuous Delivery(CD). For that tester, when he/she thinks about automation (actually “tools” is the right word), he/she should not have in mind only gherkin/ranorex/ui automation….In fact, when the tester will notice that these kind of tools are promoted/enforced he/she should be skeptical. Yes, if the tester can make use of them because it’s applicable, then why not, but they should not be caught in a trap with these tools and see nothing else beyond them.
Regarding CI and “automated testing”(checking is the right word not testing, semantics matter(1)), just to be clear, they are useful but they are not “the path, the way and the truth”.
Let’s do a small exercise: Can you imagine a situation in your product/project where 12 things are related? By 12 I mean persons, requirements, things in source code. Regarding a person, from anthropology, we know that he/she has multiple identities and he/she shifts between them(2). If we have 12 dots, this means the number of possible links is 12(12-1)/2=66. But the number of possible patterns is: 2 at the power of 66=4,700 quadrillion patterns(3). At this level, we no longer speak about deduction, induction, but abduction. Now think again at CI with the automated checks and number of test cases written and executed…something is not ok, right? Somehow I begin to see the cons of blindly believing in CI/CD.
(1) James Bach, Michael Bolton, “Testing and Checking Refined, https://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/856
(2) Dave Snowden, “The landscape of management: Creating the context for understanding social complexity”, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228449006_The_landscape_of_management_Creating_the_context_for_understanding_social_complexity
(3)”The problem of connecting the dots”, https://sensing-ontologies.com/the-problem-of-connecting-the-dots/