Hey everyone…I’m currently working as a consultant, primarily handling webmaster duties for a large company where we’re migrating a CMS with around 5000 webpages. During a recent meeting, I found out that the company doesn’t seem to have any automated testing in place—they’re manually testing every single page! When I requested additional rights to set up some automation for testing in the VDI, some folks with titles like “Test Analyst” looked totally baffled. They even asked me to give a demo on automated testing, which makes me wonder if they’re serious or just messing with me. It’s hard to believe a big company like this is so out of touch with automated testing.
Any thoughts or advice on how to handle this?
They probably aren’t joking—this kind of thing does happen. I was in a meeting with a potential client who wanted to hire my agency to help wrap up a project. Turns out, the project had been in the works for ages, and they hadn’t set up any testing or even used Git and GitHub.
I’d suggest finding out how they’re currently doing testing so you can tailor your approach. Basically, ask them what’s going on without making it seem like they’re clueless.
If it’s 5,000 pages, I’m guessing a lot of them are templated, so they’re probably just testing a sample instead of every single page. Back in the day, we had specific pages just for manual testing of templates.
If you dive into really old codebases, you’ll often find hardly any tests at all.
Do they have a CTO? Are they a tech company or just a big business? If they don’t have any devs or high-level tech people with coding backgrounds, it’s not too surprising that they don’t have automated testing.
Also, not sure about your experience level, but it’s pretty common for medium to large companies to skip automated testing and stick with manual QA.