Human Brain: The Best Tool to Test

Human Brain: The Best Tool to Test

        There is “N” number of automation tools available in the market and also many are yet to be released in the market.  We have come across with number of tools. So which is the best among the available tools? I would say that, the tool which is residing among all of us and can't be sold out to the market. Yes, it’s a “Human Brain" the more powerful than any other automation tools. I agree that the tools can work faster than the human hand work, but if everything is automated, then there is no work for the tester’s new ideas. Imagine if there is a big testing war that is yet to come and we need to face that. How to get ready to face that challenge? Can we prepare a tool for the upcoming war? How can we make that without knowing what sort of war is that? So preferences should be given more to the brain work than the automation work. This helps the testers to walk on their path rather than someone else path and help them to face any sort of challenges.

How the automation tools should be used:

         As my coach says "There is different mechanism that should be applied while eating food. It's quite hard to eat chapati in spoon or fork. The spoon can be used while eating idly or any item related to that.  So don't depend on spoon/fork for all items that you want to eat.  Now, relate this to the software application. When we test, we should not totally depend on automation tool. It has to be used where it is supposed to be used. We can’t eat ice cream in hand. Here we need a spoon. Similarly we can’t test a million data manually. Here we need to test with the help of tools.  It has to be used where it is supposed to be used. It’s better to test manually in case of testing some medical equipment and also the product that might harm when it goes wrong. If we want to check X million data, in such case the tool can be used. But still some cross check can be done manually that gives a good confidence. Pick some data randomly and test manually.

When we trust that the tool we use doesn't cause any problem and the result produced from such tool is a perfect one and if we believe that the end result is the exact one. Then imagine if any non-reproducible bug exists in that tool. In such case, some time there is a chance of showing the error data as a right one and the correct data as a wrong one. So here I come to say that don't trust on tools always trust your own test ideas. That's helps you lot in case of testing any medical equipment’s, etc.  So I feel it is good to test manually and then you can go for automation.

               So don't depend on tool always. In short to say a tool is like a guide for the text book .It can't be an actual text book.  Still if people believe that tool can be a text book, and then I say as "A fool with a tool is still a fool".   The cost of risk can be minimized when it is done by manual than the automation.