My friend Scott mentioned that he thought it was a waste to have humans functionally test a system. That you should only use an automated tool for functional testing. I agree, but I would like to add that you should also have humans do functional testing to check for the areas where a test script may not go. The edge cases. A good tester will automate most of his job, and then continue to check out the system manually to look for those small problems that a tool will not catch. Generally, some of those things will be look and feel. They may be problems with translations. There might be a speed issue. It takes 20 seconds for the response to come back, but the tool passes the test because the response came back.
I am sure the uber complex testing tools out there may be able to measure repsonse, maybe even look and feel, but there still needs to be a human that goes through the system to ensure that the system passes the tests as well.
Posted by carl at December 23, 2004 08:32 PM
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