The Perils of Manual Testing

Introduction

Every software engineer writes code. To manage the workload better, the engineer can break down their task into smaller pieces of work. Before marking a piece of work as complete, the code is frequently tested using a variety of ways. Software testing is the process of verifying that software does what it is intended to do. The benefits of testing include preventing bugs, reducing development costs, and improving performance. The most rudimentary way of testing involves manual testing. Before understanding what a manual test is, we must understand the concept of a test case.

A test case is a set of operations that a system is set to perform in order to determine whether the system satisfies the requirements and functions correctly. We may think of software testing as comprising numerous test cases. Test cases can be performed in any way whatsoever—manually, where a person runs the test cases themselves and inspects the results, or can be automated through the use of testing tools and frameworks.

Therefore, manual testing is a type of software testing where a person manually executes test cases without using any automation tools. The person who executes manual tests is known as a tester and can be the developer or another member of the team, such as a dedicated tester.

Advantages of manual testing

• Lower barriers to entry: Manual testing is the most primitive of all testing types and consequently does not require any knowledge of any testing tools.
• Quicker in the short term: In the short term, manual testing is quicker. This advantage may not persist as the code grows.
• More effective in the short term: During the initial stages of development, manual testing is more effective, because automated testing requires some degree of known variables before writing the automated tests. If the fundamental code and architectural design changes rapidly, manual tests avoid the downtime and upfront costs that automated testing demands.