It’s a rare appreneur who doesn’t want to get their commercial software up and running as soon as possible. Still, before your application of any other piece of software hits the app store, you need to make sure it works as intended. They say that software can never be bugless and completely trouble-free. Still, if you put enough time and effort into its testing, you’ll be able to save yourself the most valuable resources like time, money, and effort. What’s more, you can spare your customers the disappointment and bother of having to look for a similar piece of software elsewhere.
You can go about testing your software two ways. The first way is tried-and-true manual testing, which still remains an integral part of the software development cycle. The second approach allows simplifying and accelerating the testing process with the help of dedicated tools, which enable testers to automatically validate and review a piece of software at hand. Hence the name – automated testing. Learn more about both approaches to figure out which one can be the best fit for your project. And if you’re looking for more exhaustive information on types of software testing, you may want to read the complete guide.
Manual Testing
As it has been noted, manual testing requires human involvement. In this type of testing, testers manually run all the necessary tests and access a specific product’s ability to properly perform its functions. The major task of a manual tester is to validate the key features of a digital product and spot possible bugs. As a rule, no specialized automation tools are used in this type of testing. At this stage, specialists aim to catch the major functional errors and create reports by hand.
Automation Testing
As its name suggests, automation testing doesn’t require human intervention, at least, not to such an extent as its manual counterpart. Just like manual testing, automation testing aims to ensure that a new product can fully meet development requirements and is capable of performing the functions it was designed to perform. Still, this type of testing relies on more advanced tools and scripted sequences, which makes it possible to perform testing at any time and from anywhere. Thus, testing can be performed more frequently without any direct human intervention and additional time investment.
Major Pros and Cons of Manual Testing
Manual trying out is a outstanding manner to catch insects and errors in the early levels of the development system. Moreover, guide testers can take care of greater nuanced check eventualities and decrease the chance of the incidence of false negatives, that can sluggish down the validation process. At the same time, this kind of testing is time-ingesting and much less efficient. It takes a good deal time and labor to manually check software program, which decreases the overall productivity of the improvement crew and increases it slow to marketplace.
Major Pros and Cons of Automation Testing
Unlike manual testing, automation testing cannot handle complex test scenarios. And manual testing remains the only possible option should there be the need for infrequent and/or high-risk tests. Also, manual testing is still the best bet for cases where it’s necessary to collect information about usability and overall UX. At the same time, automation testing is becoming more popular due to its ability to cover a wide range of tests within the shortest possible time.
Now that most tasks can be automated, automated testing allows covering more permutations and executing countless complex test cases during every test without human intervention. Automated tests can be run throughout the entire development cycle and repeated whenever necessary without putting in additional costs. It significantly reduces time to market and allows for speeding up your ROI. Automation testing goes a long way toward helping testers faster debug their products and avoid human errors.
That being said, you should keep in mind that it’s still impossible to take the manual work out of the testing process completely. Testers still need to write the baseline testing scripts which will be subsequently used in automation testing. Also, note that not all tests can and should be automated. So, always take your individual case into account prior to manually testing your product or selecting an automation toolset to automatically test it.
