[philk10]

I might be biased ( ex-dev with 20 years experience from Assembler to C to .Net etc ) but GOOD manual testing requires a lot of skill. If it didn't then I wouldn't have switched from dev to test. I work in a shop where they had devs doing all the testing, tons of automation but they still found that a good exploratory tester added value. But from your comment it may well be that you've never worked with someone like me - maybe when you do you'll think different

[gsnedders]

I think a lot depends on specific definitions: a manual test suite, where you have a list of tests with clear steps and a clear expectation, is definitely near-zero skill to execute. Actual exploratory testing, on the other hand, is skilled: especially if they're expected to write up tests (automated or not) that test code paths that haven't previously been tested.