You have caught yourself in a situation where your business demands more automation? You are a tester in a company where few people have both the skills and guts to dive into test automation? No worries, also manual testers can be engaged and involved when such an activity is required.

WHY TO DO SO?

Manual testing is as good as automated, they just with different purposes. One cannot replace another but they can supplement each other. There are many different companies and projects out there and they all require different approaches. At one point you may realize that your project have grown too complex that you can’t handle all regression tests manually anymore. The outcome is: you require more testers that can perform what it takes.

So do you hire more people? If you really believe you have to deal with more and more automation you should not only hire more testers, focus more on people who cannot only test but are also willing and motivated to learn new stuff.

Despite their lack of skills you may encourage and involve some manual testers and you will gain newer, better testers and a properly tested product as an outcome. Sounds like a win-win situation, right?

HOW TO DO SO?

• Sent testers straightaway to your developers if possible. Let them take part in code reviews or make them look at unit tests. They must realize why these tests are run at any particular level and they have to understand what causes tests to fail.
• Manual testers should collaborate as much as possible with automation testers. They may determine many areas where they are going through over, over and over again and might all be scripted later.
• Allow testers to toy around with existing scripts with different input data. Let them wonder about the product and how it is being automated. Show them the magic!
• Do whatever it takes to encourage coding skills and the desire to learn coding.
• You are done, enjoy the benefits!