There can be a role for manual testing on agile projects, but being agile is difficult if a team spends two, three, four or more days manually testing
each iteration.
When that happens, teams either move to longer sprints or they add testing, hardening, or stabilization sprint.
An over-reliance on manual-testing is a form of technical debt, which is any intrinsic technical deficiency in a product.
technical debt can sink a product.
In fact, technical has led all the way to the demise of entire companies.
Technical debt frustrates customers, companies, and developers.
Fortunately, there's a simple three-step process you can use to pay down a team's manual testing debt.
The first step is to stop the bleeding, which means stopping the situation from getting worse.
I worked with a team that spent about 50 hours every two-week sprint performing manual testing, essentially the last two days of every sprint.
If this team didn't make a change, the 50-hours would become 55 hours, then 60 hours and more.
As the amount of time spent on manual-testing debt climbs, it will be harder to pay it off.
it was urgent to stop things from getting worse.
To do this, team members looked for easy things to automate.
They didn't need to animate features being added in the current iteration.
That could come later.
The immediate concern was to Stop things From Getting Worse.
One simple automation they had created was for logging into the system and navigating to one of the areas under active development.
This saved everyone on the team about a minute for every test they ran.
With hundreds of manual tests being run each sprint, this was a big savings.
The second step in paying off manual test debt is staying current.
This is the critical phase when team members add automated tests for every new feature they add to the product.
Team members added their definition of done that every feature includes automated test.
Adding automation for each new features is not easy, but it helps that team member are able to improve their test automation skills during the stop the
bleeding phase.
A team can remain in the stay-current phase indefinitely.
Although they may still have a lot of debt, things are no longer getting worse.
The final step is paying the debt down.
During this catch-up phase, team members systematically attack the technical debt.
Sometimes this can be difficult because long-standing debt can hard to remove.
However, even incremental progress will help.
After all, the team has stopped the bleeding and is staying current with new automated tests for all new features.
They're now moving in the right direction.
We'd obviously like to see the debt paid down quickly, but that isn't always practical given competing needs for the teams time.
Following the three steps I've outlined, stopping the bleeding, staying current, and finally paying down the debt, can help any team reduce its over-reliance
on manual testing.
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