i'm in QA - have been for 12 years. Testers who can only perform manual testing, and organisations that only test manually are the product of companies realisin

i'm in QA - have been for 12 years. Testers who can only perform manual testing, and organisations that only test manually are the product of companies realising they should 'do some qa', and managers who do not understand SW development signing off to build large, manual only test teams. It's inefficient, there is a very slow rate of feedback to devs, not much can be done until there is a working UI - so it all lends itself to the broken waterfall model of code code code, then 'do some testing' right at the end of the project - which has already seen overruns from dev squeeze qa time out. Manual QA testers are relatively cheap on paper - so managers don't see a problem with building a team this way. I'm not sure this will ever go away, but as someone who tries to learn every year, and master his career, I welcome Yahoo's choice. I see a role for a highly skilled 'developer in test' role superseding the traditional, ineffective manual QA role. Someone who can build automation frameworks quickly, be responsible for maintaining them and test data, and provide rapid feedback to devs. Devs should still be carrying out unit testing, code reviews etc, but I do believe a role still exists for someone to focus on QA, just with a lot more skills, providing far more rapid feedback, with less dependencies on the devs for test environments.