I feel the need of calling out a mystical creature: a thinking tester who does not think. This creature is born because of *automation*. That somehow, because of the magic of automation, the smart, thinking tester dumbs down and forgets all other activities around and just writes mindless code.
This is what I feel I see when I see comparisons of what automation does to testing, most recently this one: Implication of Emphasis on Test Automation in CI.
To create test automation, one must explore. One must figure out what it is that we're automating, and how could we consistently check the same things again and again. And while one seeks for information for the purposes of automation, one tends to see problems in the design. Automation creation forces out focus in detail, and this focus in detail that comes naturally with automation sometimes needs a specific mechanism when freeform exploring. Or, the mechanism is the automation thinking mindset.
I remember reading various experience reports of people explaining how all the problems their automation ever found were found while creating the automation. I've had that experience in various situations. I've missed bugs for choosing not to automate because the ways I chose to test drove my focus of detail to different areas or concerns. I've found bugs that leave my automated tests in "expected fail" state until things get fixed.
The discussion around automation is feeling weird. It's so black and white, so inhumane. Yet, at core of any great testing, automated or not, there is a smart person. It's the skills of that person that turn the activity into useful results.
Only the worst of the automators I've met dismiss the bugs they find while building the automation. Saves them time, surely, but misses a relevant part of feedback they could be providing.
