Why IoT Testing Proves Manual Testing Never Died with Oleksii Cherkashyn

Manual testing never died. IoT is the proof.

In this episode, Joe Colantonio talks with Oleksii Cherkashyn, a QA team lead, automation engineer, and IoT testing specialist who built a complete test architecture from scratch across hardware, firmware, mobile, web, and API.

IoT breaks the usual automation playbook. You are not testing a shopping cart. You are connecting a real microcontroller, flashing a sketch, validating that a physical command produced the right change in a dashboard widget, and then doing the same thing again through the REST API and the mobile app. No marketplace framework covers that, so Oleksii built his own.

You'll learn:

• Why manual QA remains essential in IoT and which cases can never be automated
• How Oleksii built a custom Node.js library to simulate up to 50,000 device connections for performance testing without buying the hardware
• Why he chose WebDriverIO over Playwright and the mobile automation reason behind it
• How he uses WebDriverIO MCP and cloud coding agents every day to create and repair tests
• The hard truth about dependent test chains and where AI agents still hallucinate
• How to handle time based scenarios like sleep modes, daily triggers, and delayed notifications
• Static versus dynamic provisioning, and how to test OTA firmware updates
• What to do first if your company hands you an IoT device and you have never tested hardware

If you work in test automation and you want a look at the layer of testing that AI is not coming for, this one is for you.

Listen up, and check out the links below for everything mentioned in this episode.