Is Manual Testing becoming obsolete in an era where automation is advancing at an unstoppable pace and algorithms are navigating a diverse digital landscape? Surprisingly, amid automated processes, the relevance and depth of manual testing’s impact surpass mere mechanization.
The true story of software quality assurance is told at this crossroads of innovation and tradition. Here, aided by knowledge and intuition, the human touch creates an assurance that cannot be replicated even by advanced automation systems.
Delve into why manual testing continues to be essential in the age of automation, emphasizing its distinct advantages and crucial role in delivering high-quality software.
4 reasons why Manual Testing is considered indispensable
- Early Ambiguity Detection
Manual Testing helps validate requirements, reveal unclear points, and ensure the delivered product and stakeholder expectations align. In the early phases of development, manual testing is crucial when requirements may be ambiguous or changing. Also, functional domain knowledge & experience are key to deriving the test cases.
Additionally, manual testing is useful for finding scenarios and cases that automated testing may miss thus strengthening the software’s overall robustness.
- Human-intuitive
The thinking of testers in the manual testing process allows them to investigate a variety of scenarios and find possible problems that automated tests could overlook.
Manual Testing thus helps identify problems that may affect the user experience by aligning human intuitive skills and empathy for end users.
- Easier Adaptability
By delving into the program without following pre-written scripts, manual testing, in contrast to automated testing, enables testers to conduct exploratory testing. This process may have missed hidden defects or issues. Manual testing thus plays an essential component in the testing process since it may be highly flexible and adaptive due to its utilization of human intellect, flexibility, and exploration.
- User Story Validation
The human perspective and straightforward comprehension of user requirements that manual testing offers improve user narrative validation. Testers can carefully check every story detail to ensure that the user story meets the user’s expectations and provides the required functionality. Testers can identify usability problems, edge cases, and inconsistencies that may have gone unnoticed in automated testing.
Use Case
A US-based e-commerce business needed independent testing for its iOS, Android, and web applications before release into the market. They had less documentation and needed a quick quality review within a month.
In the absence of less documentation, they employed independent manual functional testing. Three test engineers worked under documentation carrying out nearly 1,500 test cases covering admin and user operations. The testing ensured the apps weren’t released with serious flaws by finding over 130 errors, including critical vulnerabilities, and providing a thorough report.
Thus manual testing of the user story serves as a means of confirming that the functionality it describes has been appropriately designed and functions as planned.
Real-world scenarios on Manual Testing over Automation
Although testing and quality assurance mostly rely on automation software, there are many real-world situations in which manual testing is essential. Human testers contribute creativeness, emotion, and empathy to the testing process, allowing for a thorough assessment of software in several scenarios and guaranteeing the production of high-caliber, user-focused solutions.
- Localization and International Testing
Manual testing by native speakers or experts in the target market is frequently necessary to confirm the suitability and quality of translations and cultural adaptations, as automatic checks may overlook linguistic variations and context-specific issues.
Human testers evaluate the suitability and correctness of regionalized material, which can differ greatly between locations.
- Security Vulnerabilities Testing
Although basic security checks and known vulnerabilities can be found with automated technologies, rigorous security testing in software testing often calls for human interaction.
In addition to performing hacking tests and simulating actual attack scenarios, manual testers additionally identify security flaws that may go undetected by automated scans.
- Accessibility Testing
Manual testing is necessary to ensure that software is accessible to users with disabilities because automated technologies might not adequately examine elements like keyboard navigation, color contrast, and screen reader compatibility.
- User Feedback Analysis
Analyzing bug reports, support requests, and user comments requires human interpretation and judgment. To provide useful insights that guide continuing development and improvement efforts, manual testers rank issues according to factors like severity, frequency, and influence on user experience.
- User Experience Testing
Human judgment is needed to evaluate the entire user experience, by considering elements like responsiveness, aesthetics, and emotional impact. Manual Testers provide qualitative feedback that is not possible for automated tests to capture, evaluating subjective aspects of the software’s functionality and design.
Conclusion
Although automation has transformed software testing, the importance of manual testing cannot be overstated. A human viewpoint is added to the process through manual testing, which provides perceptions and instincts that automated technologies could miss. Delivering high-quality software solutions in the age of automation therefore requires adopting a balanced strategy that draws on the advantages of both Automated and Manual testing.
Author: GeakMinds
GeakMinds, a trusted IT and Analytics consulting firm and a classical partner of Microsoft brings over ten years of experience in delivering Data & AI, Digital Transformation, Testing, and Staffing solutions.