Why IoT Testing Proves Manual Testing Never Died with Oleksii Cherkashyn
with Oleksii Cherkashyn
Quality Assurance Team Lead at Blynk Technologies Inc
August 18, 2026 
Hosted by Joe Colantonio 
Key takeaways
What you'll learn in this episode
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
About this episode
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.
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.
Google Scholar profile: www.scholar.google.com/OleksiiCherkashyn
Web of Science profile: www.webofscience.com/OleksiiCherkashyn
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