What is Manual Testing? Complete Guide With Examples

In addition, these tools are robotic and often don’t behave in the same way as an actual user would. It requires a tester to play the role of an end user where by they use most of the application’s features to ensure correct behaviour. To guarantee completeness of testing, the tester often follows a written test plan that leads them through a set of important test cases. In software quality assurance, manual and automated testing plays a crucial role in ensuring that the software performs optimally.

• The main goal of functional testing is to validate that the application functions as intended and delivers the expected results.
• Manual testing does not require a tester to be well-versed in programming.
• With manual testing, the QA team must be creative to think of and test scenarios where users can potentially cause errors, such as malformed data, empty mandatory fields, or database connection failures.

The white box testing is done by Developer, where they check every line of a code before giving it to the Test Engineer. Since the code is visible for the Developer during the testing, that’s why it is also known as White box testing. Manual testing is essential because one of the software testing fundamentals is “100% automation is not possible.” Humans can respond to unpredictability, but for automated test scripts, a slight change in the environment is enough to return false positives. The happy path is the expected and ideal journey through a system or application where everything goes smoothly without any errors or issues.

Limitations in handling complex or large-scale testing scenarios

Teams perform several types of system testing, like regression testing, stress testing, functional testing, and more, depending on their access to time and resources. This approach helps QAs evaluate how several application components work together to provide the desired result. Performing integration testing in parallel with development allows developers to detect and locate bugs faster. Unit Testing involves the verification of individual components or units of source code. It focuses on testing the functionality of individual components within the application. Developers often use it to discover bugs in the early stages of the development cycle.

From this perspective, automated testing can be easily integrated into the continuous integration and delivery pipeline, allowing for continuous testing throughout the software development lifecycle. This ensures that issues are identified and addressed early, improving the overall software quality metrics. Additionally, automation testing not only saves time and resources but also provides a level of precision and reliability that is hard to achieve with manual testing alone.

Types of Manual

We need manual testing as the first step of understanding and verifying the application for its correctness for the users. The manual testing approach helps to assess the application from a user’s perspective and evaluate the user interface, intuitiveness, ease of use, and overall user experience of the software. Another reason why manual testing is necessary is to perform exploratory or Ad Hoc testing.

Accessibility testing ensures that every feature of a website or app is easy to use by people who may have disabilities such as visual or hearing impairment, color blindness, or any other physical issues. They may experience manual qa training some form of disability, requiring some form of assistive technology to operate certain technology. QAs verify the actual behavior of software against expected behavior, and any difference is reported as a bug.

Need to Run Manual Tests on Real Devices & Browsers?

Its primary aim is to identify issues that may arise when multiple units are integrated. For example, in an e-commerce website, integration testing would involve verifying the interaction between the shopping cart module and the payment gateway. In black-box testing, the software is evaluated without any knowledge of the internal workings or code. The focus is purely on the outputs generated in response to specific inputs and execution conditions. Furthermore, manual testing plays a significant role in the software development lifecycle. During the early stages of development, when the software is still taking shape, automated tests may not be practical or detailed enough.

Although it may evolve and transform, the human perspective that manual testing offers will always be valuable as long as creating a positive user experience is a priority in software development. Manual testing complements automated testing to ensure that software is technically sound, user-friendly, and enjoyable to use. Manual testing requires huge investments as it is carried out by humans (testers) rather than machines (automation tools). On the other hand, automated testing is less expensive since the cost of executing it is decided by the amount of time spent coding and maintaining it, not by the number of man hours required or times testing is done. Manual testing can be significantly more time-consuming than automated testing, especially for large and complex applications. It requires more human resources, and the time taken to execute test cases manually can lead to longer development cycles.

System Testing

Testing of software can be described as the evaluation and validation of software to know if it is free of bugs. It caters to its technical design requirements and ensures efficiency and robustness for the users. In addition, it tends to measure the software’s specifications, functionality, and user performance.

After fixing bugs, retesting is crucial to ensure the issues are resolved. Additionally, regression testing is conducted to confirm that new changes have not adversely affected existing functionalities. Crafting a test plan is next, where QA developers outline their testing strategy, objectives, and necessary resources.

To login and use all of the features correctly is staying on the happy path, but unexpected scenarios exist, and QA teams must account those scenarios into their test plan too. Manual testing allows them to venture into the “unhappy path” where error conditions are triggered and the system is put under the extremes. Even in large scale testing projects with established infrastructure for automation testing, there can be test scenarios that are too complicated to be automated. Admittedly, automation testing is more ROI-positive in the long run than manual testing, but in too complex cases, technical limitation is truly a roadblock. Software development is a highly dynamic process with requirements constantly changing, and human testers can adapt to these changes quickly by adopting a new test approach. Both manual testing and automation testing have their strengths and weaknesses.

This process involves direct human interaction with the software to uncover defects and ensure functionality meets the intended project requirements. Unlike automated testing, which relies on pre-written scripts to execute tests, manual testing involves QA professionals and developers manually executing test cases without the aid of special automation tools. This hands-on approach enables the tester to experience the application from the end-user perspective, providing unique insights into user experience, interface design, accessibility, and overall usability.

Collaboration with the development team

Each testing method has its strengths and is ideal for use in specific situations. Understanding the differences between manual and automated testing and how they complement each other is essential for devising an effective QA strategy. Manual testing has a significant advantage over automated testing regarding the human element it brings to the table. Testers can use their experience and intuition to explore and evaluate the software in ways automated tests cannot. This human touch is beneficial in comprehending the user experience, pinpointing UI/UX issues, and providing feedback on the subjective aspects of the software, such as its appearance and feel.