Manual Testing

What is Manual Testing?

As the name suggests, Manual testing is the one in which application testing happens manually. The test cases/scenarios are executed one by one by Testers (professional involved in software testing) manually without using any readymade tools, and then the results are verified.

So manual testing is a process in which we compare the behavior of a piece of software (it can be a component, module, feature, etc.) with the predefined, expected behavior which we set during the initial phases of SDLC.

Manual verification is the most primitive form of software testing. A novice can do it without any knowledge of any particular tool. Even a student, who has a basic understanding of the application or testing of a system, can perform manual verification. Nonetheless, it is an essential step in the software testing cycle. Any new system or applications must be tested manually before automating the testing.

Majorly, it helps in ensuring the quality of the application by ensuring the following points:

• Ensuring that the application meets the defined system requirements.
• Finding out any bugs/errors which may arise while running the application.

Before moving deep into understanding the concepts of manual testing, lets first try to understand why do we need manual verification of an application in the first place?

Why do we need manual testing?

With the changing trends in the software industry, more and more software professionals prefer automated testing, but there are still multiple reasons which justify the need for manual testing. Few of them are:

• Human Perspective: The basic usability and look & feel of the application can only be gazed and evaluated by Humans. As the software is developed for humans only, so they only can do better justice of validation from a user experience perspective.
• A broader perspective and variation of the System workflows: Manual verification always gives a broader perspective of the overall application. As the human mind will always be in an exploratory form, instead of a coding mechanism that executes the same steps each time. So, it will provide more expansive coverage for the system validation.
• Cost of automation: Sometimes, due to the timelines or size of the project, the extended efforts for the automation are not justifiable, and we always prefer a quick manual validation over the automation testing.
• Un-automatable scenarios: There can be multiple scenarios that are either not worth automating and doesn't give clear confidence of the user behavior when just testing using automation. For Example, there have been multiple scenarios on mobile devices, which need user interactions, such as "Tap & Pay", which sometimes have different behaviors when automated using tools and when a person manually validated them.