By – Shraddha Pande

The businesses imperative to drive value into the market at a faster and faster pace often translates into shorter development and delivery cycle times. And even with a top-notch development team, only a well-planned and systematic test plan will ensure that your products function as expected across Web and mobile channels when introduced to the marketplace.

A primer on manual testing of software

When selecting a particular testing approach, don’t ignore the most basic testing method of Manual Testing. Sometimes considered elementary, this testing technique is also the oldest and most stringent form of testing software products. It is done by a test engineer who behaves and works on the product or application as an end-user, executing the test cases manually without tool support. The test engineer verifies all the features of the application or product to ensure that the behavior of the application is correct and in accordance with the client requirements.

Adhering to the Software Testing Life Cycle, the engineer will create and follow a Test Plan to ensure the comprehensiveness of testing, while executing the test cases manually without using automation testing tools. The test engineer creates Test Cases to test the application via a certain set of steps that have defined Expected Results. These results are then checked against Actual Results. After executing these test cases manually, each functional test case is either marked as passed (with zero defects) or failed (having some defects). A benefit of manual testing is that all the test cases are executed manually executed by the testers, meaning that the program is less susceptible to machine faults.

Recommended Manual Test Process 

1. Requirement Analysis: Determine and document the needs and requirements of the client, product, and application. Determine the needs and responsibilities for the testing process.
2. Test Plan Creation: Build the Test Plan for the product/application on the basis of requirements developed in Step I. The Test Plan should include: Objective, Scope, Focus Areas, Time Estimation, Resources and Responsibilities.
3. Test Case Creation: Create detailed Test Cases including Test Scenario.
4. Test Case Execution: Execute the Test Cases to verify the actual and expected results.
5. Defect Logging: Identified defects should be logged and tracked based on the conditions. We will discuss this more in our upcoming blog.“Creating Effective Bugs”.
6. Defect Fix & Re-verification: After fixing any known defects, it is critical to re-verify and process them accordingly.

Recognizing the Value of Manual Testing in Today’s World

• It delivers better usability testing than automated testing.
• Greater assurance that the product or application is free from machine defects.
• Delivers detailed program analysis.
• This does a superior job at identifying non-testable requirements.
• This type of can also provide better understanding of functionality.
• Does a better job covering Test cases and Test Scenarios.
• Manual testing scripts provide useful feedback to development teams and can form the basis for help or tutorial files for the application under test.
• It can cover certain security aspects that automation tools are not designed to address.
• It can lead to discovery of more complex vulnerabilities due to its flexibility. Humans can run a creative combination of attacks to discover any vulnerability out of reach of the automation test tools.
• Automation testing benefits from building on the work already accomplished in the manual testing process.

Conclusion:

In sum, it is important that QA teams recognize that Manual Testing can deliver critical results in the testing process. Manual Testing generally has lower up-front costs and allows a team to exercise flexibility during the testing process. Manual Testing can also be combined with an automated approach to deliver very positive and powerful results.

Keep looking at our blog section for more on this topic and click the link to know more about manual testing tools.

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