Testers & their passion for test automation

Once a group of software testers were traveling on a plane to attend a test automation conference. Their plane was hijacked by terrorists and all people on board, including the testers were held hostages.

The situation was grim as terrorists appeared to be dangerous with AK-56 strapped across their chests. The terrorists demanded a lot of things that the government couldn’t meet. After seven hours of flying, the plane was running out of fuel. The only demand government could meet was to refuel the plane.

Terrorists chose an airport to land and the plane was refueled enough to fly for 12 more hours. The terrorists threatened to kill a hostage every one hour if their demands were not met.They demanded the release of a terrorist who was captured by the government last month during an operation. The government had only three options: a) to release the terrorist b) to ignore the threat and get all people on board killed c) to perform a surgical strike during the next refueling session.

The government opted for option c. The surgical strike team consisted of highly skilled commandos who were trained in such rescue missions. The commandos pretending to be refueling the plane stormed into the plane and had concealed the latest FMG (Folding Machine Gun) which they unleashed to kill all eleven terrorists on board with minor bullet injuries to hostages.

After the strike was over, all passengers including the software testers on board stood up and clapped for quite sometime while commandos were preparing to off board the passengers. The news had become viral across the world and there were a lot of people waiting to receive the passengers. The conference organizers felt proud to receive the software testers who were on board this flight that had been rescued.

On the request of the conference organizers, those software testers decided to talk on what lessons can be learnt from the experience to software testing. With a huge round of applause, one of them came on stage, held the microphones and in a bold voice said, “Those commandos used a fully automatic machine gun to kill all the terrorists. That indicates that we should make our testing fully automatic to find all bugs”. Every tester in the hall clapped for the great lesson they learnt. 

Moral of the story: Testers and Test management have forgotten to appreciate their own colleagues and consider processes and tools help them achieve their goals.  Update: Also quoting Julian Harty : "Automation should be a servant, not master of our Software delivery"

If you have a colleague whom you want to appreciate and don't mind doing that in the comments section here, just go for it. Let me start.