Manual Testing and its Advantages, Disadvantages

What is Manual Testing ?

• Manual testing is the oldest and most rigorous type of software testing. Manual testing requires a tester to perform manual test operations on the test software without the help of Test automation. 

• Manual testing is a laborious activity that requires the tester to possess a certain set of qualities;
• To be patient,
• Observant,
• Speculative,
• Creative,
• Innovative,
• Open-minded,
• Resourceful,
• Un-opinionated,
• Skillful.

Advantages of Manual Testing :

• Manual Testing is eye ball testing
• Applications with short life cycles.
• Applications that have GUIs that constantly changes
• It requires less time and expense to begin productive manual testing.
• Automation cannot replace human intuition, inference, and inductive reasoning.
• Automation Testing cannot change course in the middle of a test run to examine something that had not been previously considered.
• Manual QA testing can be used in both small and big projects.
• Easily we can update our test case according to project movement.
• It is covered in limited cost.
• Easy to learn for new people who are entered into testing.
• Manual QA Testing is more reliable than automation (in many cases automation will not cover all cases)

Disadvantages of Manual Testing :

• GUI objects size difference and color combination etc is not easy to find out in manual testing.
• Load testing and performance testing is not possible in manual testing.
• Running test manually is very time consuming job.
• Regression Test cases are time consuming if it is manual testing.

Comparison to Automated Testing :

• Test automation may be able to reduce or eliminate the cost of actual testing. A computer can follow a rote sequence of steps more quickly than a person, and it can run the tests overnight to present the results in the morning. However, the labor that is saved in actual testing must be spent instead authoring the test program. Depending on the type of application to be tested, and the automation tools that are chosen, this may require more labor than a manual approach. In addition, some testing tools present a very large amount of data, potentially creating a time consuming task of interpreting the results.

• Things such as device drivers and software libraries must be tested using test programs. In addition, testing of large numbers of users (performance testing and load testing) is typically simulated in software rather than performed in practice.

• Conversely, graphical user interfaces whose layout changes frequently are very difficult to test automatically. There are test frameworks that can be used for regression testing of user interfaces. They rely on recording of sequences of keystrokes and mouse gestures, then playing them back and observing that the user interface responds in the same way every time. Unfortunately, these recordings may not work properly when a button is moved or relabeled in a subsequent release. An automatic regression test may also be fooled if the program output varies significantly.

Read more about Automation Testing and Manual Testing vs Automated testing