So it's been a few months since I've blogged, and why? Because I'm too busy doing manual testing.
It's not my main thing. I really like the duality of testing and coding associated with automation (Watir). I'm not the best programmer, which is why I didn't go down the dev track, but I feel confident in the little corner of Watir/Ruby code I use regularly to write automation. It brings a lot of pieces and technologies at different levels together (if you're a one-man show, which is frequently the case automating UI testing) which is interesting and keeps you learning new (often random) things.
So what sucks is this is the second company I've worked for that I was hired with the promise of doing automation a large percentage of the time, and the second company that has had me do relatively little automation. The first company I did zero automation for in the course of my 5 months there. For this company I did the bulk of it during holiday downtime when not a lot of dev was going on. It was great and I remembered why I got into software, I even started a blog. Now it's back to the grind and a loss of sight of the long-term payoff automation could afford if given the investment of time.
An ounce of (high quality) automation is worth a pound of manual testing.
