Can manual tester work remotely?

I have been working at a company for a few months now, and I am interested in doing the manual testing at the remote site, but I haven't been able to find any information on this.

Is this possible? Are there any downsides? Is it possible to get the same level of testing as on-site testers? The main downside is that your tester won't be able to get into a customer environment, therefore you won't be able to make changes in the environment (which is very important in case of web based applications). You will need to find a way to send the test cases and then log in to the customer environment and do the testing. You can either use a product like LoadRunner to automate the tests and then perform them manually (using Selenium) or you could perform the testing manually using a language like JAVA or C#. You could also use a tool like QTP to write your own tests.

There are a lot of tools and technologies out there, which can help you automate web based applications.

How much do manual testers make in the US?

I couldn't believe it.

But when my own team was paid the same, I finally understood why the quality engineer was treated with such contempt. Manual testers were the lowest on the totem pole.

Why is a manual tester more valuable than other engineers? There's plenty of demand, but the supply is in the thousands of dollars per hour. The real kicker was that there was an opportunity to get a six figure raise if we just moved into management. It was all based on production targets that they were never met. The only way to meet those targets was to automate and eliminate manual testing. (This was back in 2025. The rest of the salary is typically higher.

You can have it both ways. Just don't ask me how you can get one of each.

What does this have to do with software? Let's say I get asked to automate the process. Will I automating manual testers out of a job? Yes, maybe.

Most of the manual testers at my firm were hired from consulting firms. They would go into an organization and automate manual testing and then make a big sales pitch to the client for the automation project. "We'll have to automate the testers" or "We'll need a new test manager to oversee our automated testing" or whatever the reasons were for the automation.

The automated testers were usually consultants or in house from a consulting firm. They did not make a big enough profit to keep their head above water.

The manual testers also were consultants or in house from a consulting firm. They had to get a project from the automated testers and keep their head above water. So they made a big enough profit to keep their head above water.

Let's go back to the software world. If I automate a product line, then there will be no manual testers. You might automate the testers too, but they are just another tool.

Is manual QA in demand?

The answer is yes - the quality of manual testing is a bit like a bad stock market investment, which if not made can be too expensive to recover from.

In manual QA I don't mind telling the user, after they have spent 5-10 minutes with it and given me a chance to respond, I will tell them whether their problem has been solved. But the issue isn't whether I tell them or not - it's the manner in which you do so. There are some people who get cross as soon as they find out that there's a problem. They will say "Oh no you're telling me now", they will refuse to do anything except get angry or start thinking of other things.

Then there are others who don't really mind - or notice - if you tell them and they've been working away at something for a while and feel happy that they've got a result. That is what I like about the "I'll tell you when I'm finished" approach.

Of course most people would go for the second way (or they wouldn't bother using manual QA). What I don't like is making some kind of a "don't look, don't touch, don't ask" rule.

The point is, it shouldn't cost anything to discover a problem - as opposed to trying to work around it, or doing what amounts to a fix that's not so good. And at that point you should be told - "oh and how did it go?" rather than leaving it on the table until you find out what's wrong.

I often find that my users don't care about my QA until they have wasted a lot of time on it and have given up hope of a problem having been found. When they find out we're going to tell them (and, for the most part, they react well) it's because they were just asking, and not really expecting answer - that's when I have a laugh about this, at how I'd expect the poor sod to be fuming.

It is, however, worth noting that the same applies to automated tests: the point is to discover problems, to catch them before the user does. As I said at the start, there's no one answer - I suppose it depends what stage of development you're at, and the importance of your QA to your users and the developers.