In recent days, I am following a discussion on a very popular professional website linkedin and the discussion is about “Which one is more crucial in testing? Manual testing or Automation testing?"
In my opinion, Manual testing is the most crucial and important as compared to automation. In the following content I am citing my reasons as to why I consider “Manual Testing” more important compared to “Automation testing”
Firstly, Manual testing is the initial level of testing carried out on every software product. Looking on to the stages of STLC (Software testing life cycle), Test Planning is a manual activity wherein we analyze the requirements/product and come up with a concrete approach of how & what we will test and who will test. Now after this we commence to “Test Design” phase where in we design high level test scenarios by analyzing the requirement document. This is again a manual activity and there is no alternate of it. On the basis of these scenarios we design detail test cases which we execute on the application. Its only after initial iterations we identify the test cases which we can automate. Generally, the first test cases to automate are the smoke/sanity level test cases which decides that build under test is testable further OR not. Once the build gets stable we automate more and test cases related to different modules of application. This decision to automate test cases further depends on how stable your application/different parts of application is.
Secondly not all testing activities can be automated. Testing related to usability of application/product cannot be automated as it is very subjective. Moreover, when we release the software for BETA usage and urge user to test it and provide their feedback then this is more of an manual activity rather than automation as most of end users does not have automation tools on their site.
Thirdly, automation testing is covers OR relates to specific activities OR types of testing which majorly includes Regression and load.
Moreover in my opinion automation testing is more successful in case of PRODUCT rather than projects (Customized solutions developed for specific process in an organization). The reason for this is a PRODUCT is more stable and running in market whereas in a project requirement changes often and it is tedious to maintain the automation scripts.
So at the end I would say that “Manual Testing” is more important as it is initial activity and has wider scope because only on the basis of this we can decide what to automate and when.
As always , This is an open discussion and suggestions / comments are most welcome.
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