Manual Testing vs Automation Testing | Everything You need to Know

Introduction:

Automated testing has gained popularity in today's testing community. It has aided businesses in bringing new features to market more quickly while guaranteeing a bug-free user experience. Keeping up with the proliferation of various devices, browsers, and operating systems, has increased the productivity of developers and QA testers while ensuring a massive increase in test coverage. However, manual testing has kept its unique place. 

Although many IT development methodologies have changed over the past few years, the SDLC's overall structure has remained constant. It begins with gathering and comprehending requirements and ends with product testing and delivery. The final stages are crucial for winning the trust of all those users, just as the initial phases are important for creating a user-friendly output. Therefore, we bring you simple yet crucial knowledge of the distinction of manual testing vs automation testing.

What is Manual Testing?

The process of manual testing involves QA analysts running tests one at a time and independently. Before a software application goes live, manual testing is used to find bugs and feature issues. The tester verifies a software application's main functions when performing manual testing. Without the use of specialized automation tools, analysts carry out test cases and create summary error reports.

Traditional manual testing involves the testers manually scanning the software for errors while adhering to a written test plan made up of a variety of test cases. It necessitates the tester to put themselves in the user's shoes and examine the website's or mobile app's behavior to determine whether it functions as intended or whether it exhibits a different, frequently incorrect, behavior. Testers must identify deviations from expected behavior and report them to developers as defects. The same bug must be reproduced by developers before these bugs can be fixed. All of this had to be accomplished while under pressure from various teams to immediately push the changes into production.

What is Automation Testing?

Testers use tools and scripts to automate testing processes, which is known as automated testing. They can run more test cases and increase test coverage with the aid of automated testing. Testing by hand takes more time than testing by automation. Testing that is automated is more effective. 

Frameworks are used in automation testing to execute tests. Each framework has scripted automation rules specific to the software that will be tested. Various components, including function libraries, test data sources, object specifics, and other reusable modules, are integrated into this framework. Choosing the best automation testing framework is crucial because it can enhance the testing procedure by providing high performance with minimal maintenance requirements.   Depending on the needs of the business, this framework might be linear, structured, data-driven, key-driven, hybrid, or agile. The infrastructure needed for the automation testing tool to conduct testing is provided by the automation framework.

Manual Testing Vs Automation Testing

There are some significant differences between automation testing and manual testing. Without the aid of test scripts, a human performs the tests manually, step by step. Test automation frameworks, along with other tools and software, are used to automatically execute tests during automated testing. Let's go through key differences.

1. Due to the greater likelihood of human error, manual testing has lower accuracy. Automation Testing shows a higher accuracy because computer-based testing eliminates the possibility of errors.

2. When testing is required on a large scale, manual testing takes time. Testing on a large scale can be carried out with the utmost efficiency thanks to automation testing.

3. The cycle of testing for manual testing takes longer to complete, increasing the turnaround time. The turnaround time is significantly reduced because Automation Testing completes a cycle of testing in record time.

4. The cost of manual testing is higher because it requires the hiring of experienced professionals to conduct the testing. Automation Testing reduces expenses because once the software infrastructure is put in place, it functions effectively for a long time.

5. Since manual testing necessitates human observation and cognitive skills, it guarantees a high-end User Experience for the software's final user. Since the machine lacks human observational and cognitive abilities, automation testing cannot ensure a positive user experience.

6. Exploratory Testing, Usability Testing, and Ad-hoc Testing should all be carried out manually for the best results. For the best results, automation testing should be used for Regression Testing, Load Testing, Performance Testing, and Repeated Execution.

7. Users must be able to simulate user behavior & create test plans that account for all possible scenarios. To create test cases and automate as many scenarios as possible, users must have advanced scripting and programming skills.

Test automation services from WeTest provide the industry's leading services which are cloud-based mobile application testing service that allows you to perform automated testing in popular frameworks. With WeTest's automation testing services, clients will get to check their native mobile App on a wide range of real iOS and Android devices including Apple, Samsung, Pixel, Xiaomi, Huawei, etc. All devices are managed in our private Standard IDC Data Center which means stable power and unbreakable security. Also, they get to debug their mobile app using logs, video recordings, screenshots, case analyses, device analyses, and performance analyses.

Wrapping Up:

Before we wrap the topic "manual testing vs automation testing", we can state that finding the ideal balance between manual and automated testing is crucial for a highly effective engineering team to create awesome websites and apps. This guarantees quick deployment of error-free websites and applications while keeping costs under control. It's critical to plan which test categories will be run manually and which will be automated. Following that, requirements for automation Testing, such as the number of users and parallels, and capacity planning for manual Testing, such as the number of users, should be outlined. As a result, the ideal solution that optimizes coverage, speed, and costs can be developed.