Testing, in any field of life, is one of the most important and crucial stages. We have often seen people struggling with quality once a product is delivered to them. Similarly, in software, the testing phase is the most significant. Companies invest a lot of time and money in testing to ensure that the byproduct is quality-oriented.
The testing process involves evaluating a product, service, or system to determine its functionality, quality, and performance. This includes identifying and reporting any defects or bugs, followed by verifying that the product meets the set standards and requirements.
Testing can be done either manually by humans (Manual Testing) or through tools (Automation Testing).
As the name suggests, this type of testing is performed by humans. Testers interact with the product and look for potential anomalies introduced during development or requirements gathering. It involves critical thinking to explore various paths to achieve the desired outcome. The experience of testers plays a vital role, as it helps identify edge cases and execute them, resulting in uncovering defects or bugs in the system.
Automation testing involves using tools to perform testing. Pre-scripted tests are the foundation of this type of testing, executed automatically to compare actual and expected outcomes. Automation testing is particularly useful for repetitive tasks or in situations where manual testing resources are unavailable.
There are various types of testing:
Before discussing the significance of manual testing, here is a quick guide on how to perform it:
Understanding client requirements is essential. Testers need to know what they are testing and what outcomes are expected. This includes understanding the software's functionality and non-functional aspects. Based on this, an adequate team of testers is assembled.
The QA team ensures that objectives are clear, the scope is well-defined, resources are allocated, risk management strategies are in place, the test environment is planned, and documentation is thorough. Flexibility, user experience, and effective communication within the team are prioritized without compromising project goals.
Test cases must have clear objectives and scope, detailed steps for execution, specified expected outcomes, and all necessary prerequisites. Testers ensure the test cases are clear, concise, and easy to execute while including postconditions.
Before execution, QA ensures the environment is ready, including installations, configurations, and relevant data to avoid delays.
Execution is carried out test case by test case as per the outlined procedures.
Defects or bugs are reported immediately, including steps to reproduce, actual and expected results, and priority levels.
Testers log findings into the company’s tracking system to monitor progress and update statuses.
After bug fixes, regression testing ensures changes haven’t caused new issues and that functionality remains intact.
Test results are evaluated against defined criteria to determine if testing objectives were met. A test summary report documents activities, results, and additional observations or feedback.
Finally, feedback is gathered to ensure stellar product quality and to enable continuous improvement.
In manual testing, testers brainstorm and generate ideas to uncover defects by exploring various paths or cases. In automation testing, these cases are translated into scripts by test engineers and executed automatically regularly to verify the expected outcomes.
To better understand, the table below illustrates the key differences between Manual and Automation Testing.
Characteristics | Manual Testing | Automation Testing |
| Accuracy | Human reasoning and judgment trumps tech in manual testing. As this “skill” allows better management of complex tasks. | As they are dependent on test scripts, even a minute error that disrupts the outcome. And as reasoning and judgement is absent in a bot, the outcome cannot be relied upon. |
| Time of Processing | Even though manual efforts are more labour intensive and vary in terms of QA’s speed, they do not require any scripting efforts. | The initial set up in terms of scripting requires attention to detail, additional programming knowledge and relevant skills. Hence, even though the process is quick and faster to execute, the prep time is a toll. |
| Adaptability | Test cases that evolve with the needs are better suited for manual testing, as humans are more adaptable to change. | The scripts need to be revised even if there is a petty change. Hence, it tends to be quite time-consuming. |
| Requirement of Resources | Humans are the hero here. | Automation testing requires both tools and a human, and not just any human, it must be a trained one. |
| Exploratory Testing | Manual testing advocates exploratory testing. | Due to certain limitations in automation testing, exploratory testing is not possible. |
| Requirements of the Framework | Not Applicable. | Various frameworks are used. |
| Investment | The only requirement is a QA. | From automated tools to engineers, it requires good investment. |
| Human as a Resource | User-friendly systems can be developed as a human is testing and observing | Let’s be candid, a bot cannot enhance user experience. |
| Programming Knowledge | A manual tester requires no programming knowledge to perform testing. | Having programming knowledge is a prerequisite for automation testing. |
| Usage | Usable for the following:
| Usable for the following:
|
Manual testing is an integral part of the Software Development Life Cycle. An automated test will only be written if that flow has been validated by manual testing at least once. There are several ways in which manual testing surpasses automated testing:
One of the most significant benefits of manual testing is that it allows ad-hoc testing. This means a new feature or defect can be quickly tested, and there is no need to write an automated test for it!
There is a high cost involved in adding scenarios to automated scripts, and you are still not sure if that is enough. You need time to get new testing ideas automated. In manual testing, you can cover additional scenarios right away that come to mind during testing. Furthermore, there is an even higher cost involved in analyzing the testing framework and keeping it updated for changing selectors and application flow. This is where manual testing is always preferred over automated testing.
Testers can perform multiple types of testing coverage in manual testing, including functionality testing, usability testing, and accessibility testing.
One of the key benefits of manual testing is that, unlike automated testing, manual testing does not require any maintenance. On the other hand, automated tests need to be updated periodically.
Automated tests reduce manual effort and are speedy, but they lack persona-based variations during daily executions. These tests are merely repetitions of written scripts, whereas a manual tester can bring variation to their tests on a daily basis.
For major fixes in software, automated tests can only provide confidence that the "happy paths" are working fine, but ideal regression testing is not possible. This is where manual testing comes into play, giving visibility into the software's health and determining if the build is stable enough to push to production.
Testers can explore applications or software, detect any unusual behavior, and report it promptly. On the contrary, automated testing cannot identify such cases.
The time window for adding, updating, or removing test cases in automation is quite large, whereas manual testing allows for quick checks with coverage of multiple edge cases on the same day.
If there is an anomaly in the early phases of the development cycle, manual testing can easily identify it, reducing the overall cost of fixing the defect.
For scenarios that require subjective testing or are nuanced and complex in nature, manual testing is the best fit. These include:
Automated testing, without a doubt, is speedy and allows for executing cases at any time (day or night), but the coverage is still dependent on the available/written tests in the automation suite. Manual testing enables us to test unexplored flows that lack written scripts. It provides the liberty to act as a real-life user and explore applications with a human psyche, which evolves with societal changes, technological advancements, and cultural trends.
Glossary - Software Development Life Cycle
A structured process that ensures high-quality and cost-efficient software is produced in the shortest production time. It includes planning, requirements analysis, designing, coding, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
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