This article is based on commentary originally published on intelligentcio.com, featuring insights from Mandla Mbonambi, founding CEO of Africonology.
A Fast-Growing Market Demands Skilled Practitioners
The global test automation market has been on a sharp upward trajectory. According to figures cited from a Zion Market Research study, the market was valued at approximately US$16 billion in 2016 and was projected to reach US$55 billion by 2022, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of just over 23%. The underlying forces are familiar to any DevOps engineer: accelerating digital transformation initiatives, increasing release cadences driven by Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and mounting pressure to deliver quality software faster and at lower cost.
Yet market growth projections tell only half the story. The harder challenge—especially in emerging markets—is ensuring that organisations have the skilled engineers needed to act on that opportunity.
Automation Testing in the DevOps Context
Automation testing has become a first-class concern in modern DevOps pipelines. As teams adopt practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery, manual-only testing creates a bottleneck that undermines the speed and reliability those practices are designed to achieve. Automated test suites—covering unit, integration, regression, and end-to-end scenarios—allow teams to validate code changes rapidly and with repeatability that human testers alone cannot match at scale.
However, Mandla Mbonambi, founding CEO of South African tech company Africonology, is careful to frame automation as a complement to—not a replacement for—manual testing:
“Manual testing is still a critical component of testing; it cannot be completely removed. But it cannot cater for the full project scope beyond the sanity testing stage. As DevOps continues to grow in popularity alongside Continuous Integration and Delivery, automation testing is becoming increasingly important—and so are the skills that support it.”
Mandla Mbonambi, Founding CEO, Africonology
This is a nuanced but important point. Exploratory testing, usability evaluation, and edge-case discovery still depend on human judgement. Automation handles the repetitive, high-volume validation work that would otherwise slow a pipeline to a crawl.
The Skills Gap Is the Real Barrier
Market demand for automation testing expertise is outstripping supply in many regions. In South Africa specifically, Mbonambi points to a structural skills shortage rooted in gaps in technical education and limited investment in workforce development. Organisations find themselves competing for a small pool of qualified automation engineers, while large numbers of young people remain untrained and underemployed.
The skills required to operate effectively in a modern test automation role span several disciplines:
- Programming fundamentals: Writing and maintaining test scripts in languages such as Python, Java, or JavaScript requires genuine coding ability, not just familiarity with record-and-playback tools.
- Test framework knowledge: Proficiency with frameworks such as Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Jest, or pytest is increasingly expected.
- CI/CD integration: Understanding how to wire automated test suites into pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI is a core DevOps competency.
- Version control: Test code lives alongside application code in source control and must be treated with the same discipline.
- Analytical thinking: Identifying what to automate, what not to automate, and how to interpret test results requires engineering judgement that cannot be scripted.
Closing the Gap: Industry and Academia Must Collaborate
Mbonambi argues that bridging the automation testing skills gap requires a coordinated effort between the private sector, public institutions, and universities. Neither side can solve the problem alone:
“To build these skill sets in the African market, companies and universities can only align by collaborating with one another. It is time to create opportunity and expand capability through innovative projects that address existing challenges and inspire students to come up with solutions. Universities and schools must emphasise the qualities of creativity and innovation to prepare the workforce of tomorrow.”
Mandla Mbonambi, Founding CEO, Africonology
This model—industry-defined curriculum, university-led delivery, and practical project exposure—has proven effective in other technology disciplines and applies directly to test automation engineering. Internship programmes, open-source contribution initiatives, and hackathons focused on quality engineering are practical mechanisms for creating that pipeline.
Organisational Responsibility: Continuous Training and a Testing Culture
Beyond hiring, Mbonambi emphasises that organisations themselves bear responsibility for building and sustaining automation capability:
“Organisations should invest into continuous training and innovation. This will ensure that they stay ahead of the technology curve while endorsing a culture that embraces ongoing skills development and career growth. The result of this focus will be a marked increase in their testing capability while giving them the skills base they need to take advantage of the potential that automation testing offers.”
Mandla Mbonambi, Founding CEO, Africonology
In practice, this means treating test engineers as first-class members of the engineering team, allocating dedicated time for learning, and measuring quality outcomes rather than just velocity. A team that invests in its automation capability compounds those returns over time: faster feedback cycles, fewer production defects, and lower cost of change.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams
- Automation testing is not optional in a mature DevOps pipeline—it is a prerequisite for sustainable delivery velocity.
- Manual testing retains value for exploratory, usability, and context-sensitive scenarios; automation does not eliminate the need for skilled human testers.
- The skills required for effective test automation go beyond tool familiarity and include programming, CI/CD integration, and analytical problem-solving.
- Closing the skills gap requires investment from both organisations (continuous training, career development) and institutions (curricula aligned to industry needs).
- In markets with acute skills shortages, public-private collaboration and university partnerships are especially important levers for expanding the talent pool.
The test automation market will continue to grow. The organisations and regions that invest in human capability alongside tooling will be the ones that realise its full potential.