Software quality testers have a huge list of test scenarios. Each time a manual test finds bugs, the software returns back to the QA to validate the new version.
Manual testing is painful in that a human can’t work on repeated things with the same accuracy and interest. At the QA Global Summit 2022, more than half (55%) of QA professionals termed manual testing as taking too much time.
Automation testing is therefore prevailing in the technology landscape that takes the boring test scenarios to machines, leaving QA with more thoughtful work such as exploratory tests, and reviewing.
However, not all manual tests can be automated. Machines can never accurately mimic human insight to judge user experience. Hence manual testing can’t be completely neglected in QA.
This blog discusses the banal aspects of manual testing and how automation testing can salvage QA testers from painfully boring job tasks.
Please stick by to learn how to become a QA engineer in Pakistan amid the escalating IT exports of the country.
- The Manual Testing Process
- The Software Testing Strategy
- Automation Testing: An alternate to manual testing?
- Quality Assurance (QA) Career Advice in Pakistan
What’s manual testing process?
There are five stages in manual testing. Each stage has its own sub-tests and is deeply comprehensive to make sure no bug is left behind.
Remember, anything that appears outside software’s requirements is counted as a bug.
A quality tester starts from investigating functionality of the smallest part of source code called a unit and proceeds gradually through other stages each larger than the first one.
Units are integrated together and tested in integration testing. Combine these integration elements together into a whole system for system testing. UI testing checks the system’s GUI and visual performance over 3000+ devices to test functionality for each element.
The last test scenario called acceptance testing takes the whole software into the real world, allowing users to test the product in something called beta testing.
Before any QA tester starts off with these five stages, it’s important to build a software testing strategy, adding yet another important task in the list of quality engineer roles.
What’s software testing strategy?
QA engineers act as a buffer between development and production.
A strict discipline is needed to catch malfunctioning source code residing possibly at any corner of the software. Just a slight element missed and the quality of software is undermined.
An excellent quality testing strategy follows six basic steps:
- Know the desirable behavior of software
- Create a test plan to measure the desired behavior
- Write down the test cases; What are the tests? What will they reveal? Do they cover all requirements?
- Get the plan reviewed by QA lead
- Execute the plan
- Document and Report findings
Once a report is sent to the development team, the bugs are fixed in accordance and a new version of software is sent back for the same manual testing for verification.
QA engineer did work well, but going through all of the stages again that too for the same software is very painful!
What’s the other way to quality testing?
Automation testing. It’s a technology that takes all the mundane testing procedures to machines which are programmed to perform the rule based manual scenarios.
QA engineers are thus left with more valuable work such as exploratory testing and reviewing of results.
Automation testing saves the QA team from lengthy testing coverage, drastically reducing time of quality assurance.
Moreover, the accuracy of results is amazing, since machines don’t feel bored when they work through the same strategy again and again.
An initial effort, however, demands extensive automation planning and resources. Once passed through this stage, the effort needed to qualify a software is reduced straight to bottom.
Manual testing doesn’t support this kind of ease and requires a constant effort from software testers.
Full automation testing is not desirable!
Although it may sound surprising, automation is not a complete solution when it comes to software quality assurance.
The charm of manual testing lies in that it’s centered around user perception.
Although test scenarios such as regression testing, functional testing, smoke testing, and testing of complex functionalities are easily simulated over a machine; because of the simple rules they follow as they move towards completion, other testing stages such as User Interface testing can’t be made understandable to machines.
Only a human is capable of verifying the visual aspects of a software, predicting how another human (user) would interact with the software. This is known as modeling the user’s experience.
Senior SQAE automation engineer at Traconomics Ms. Naheed Anjum (LinkedIn) suggests adopting a mix of manual and automation testing for software quality assurance.
In collaboration with QA industry experts, Dice Analytics is nurturing a sustainable QA talent to meet Pakistan’s increasing IT services demand especially within a competitive neighborhood scenario.
Taking your way to the ISTQB Certification, the training serves as a first step in furthering your career towards other relevant areas such as RPA, DevOps, Cybersecurity, and Data Analytics.
Visit our services page for more information.
