Journey of a QA Engineer

I have interacted with many QA engineers during my career and I still remember all of the QA groups that I worked with (5 in total) and our discussions on bugs, quality, certifications and QA during the initial days and there after. Here are some differences in the mind set of QA engineer (including mine) during the initial phase of the career and few years after.

Initial stages	Few years after
Passionate about every bug and fights for every bug and wants every bug to be fixed in the current release	Learns when to fight and thinks of release priorities
Automation is of no use, only helps while switching jobs	Automation does help when done properly, we need automation
QA Certification's will help in career	Certifications only teaches definitions, doesn't help
Process related things are boring, testing is only important for me	Process helps
Test plans are a waste, I can test everything without a test plan in an hour	Test plans are important, helps us in not missing out scenarios
It's cool to be a developer, I want to move to development	Testing is Cool, I will continue in testing
Everything is in my brain, why should i write a document	Documents are important and helps in maintaining the process

So next time, when you hear any of this from your colleagues, it's because they are in a specific phase in their career and it's common in that phase .

Can we replace Human Brains?

Last year i went to a Hysea conference and in one of the talks there was a mention of how there will not be any testing groups in two years or five years from now on. It was an interesting topic, atleast in the lecture or on the papers.

My mind did not agree to that statement at that time and I thought that might be because of the fact that I love manual testing. Even now, after one year, it's still the same. One year or ten years, I think products can't survive without manual testing. Can we really replace Human brain? Lets take an example... we need to test a login screen with valid user name and password. Can we say that there is no problem if we try with all valid inputs? There can still be hundreds of problems there. You can be extra smart and automate every possible case there and build a super computer to run all your billion tests. Can we still say that there will not be any other problem? Login might work but it might be taking 10 seconds instead of one second or the screen might be flickering a lot while logging in. How many of these can we automate? How many every tests you build, I still think that human brain can not be replaced. There is lot of judgement involved while testing. We question a lot of things. A smart brain can even narrow down future problems while testing. Machines just say Pass or Fail, good brains tries to see if there are other problems irrespective of Pass or Fail.How can we replace a brain with a tool or a machine?