Do we really need manual testing / QA? Given the shortage of senior testers / QA, I’ve seen several experienced dev team leaders that are avoiding specific QA roles and incentivizing programmers to test and assure software quality as part of the job.

I've heard very experienced developers and team leaders explaining that they have avoided having testers and QA in their teams. Programmers write their own test cases and run them. Sometimes, they use pair programming, or pair testing (to run the test cases), but this is done by the programmers too.

Other experienced developers say that they only use Testers and QA for very specific QA controls, like security and scalability, but never to test software features. Everything must be automated as part of the pipeline, including the regression test and new features tests.

I'd love to hear what the community has to say about these ideas. It's the end of the "manual tester" ? It's the end of the new features and regression manual testing?