In the software testing arena a perennial debate has raged between proponents of manual and automation testing. In our experience, the two are complementary; used together they form a more effective test strategy.

Manual testing

Since pretty much the start of software development in the 1960’s manual testing has been carried out by teams of testers. In this technique a team of people ( qa testers) get access to the latest software build and test it to validate that the software build works correctly. For feature testing there are two broad categories of manual testing that can be carried out.

Test case based testing

In this case test cases are defined up front, prior to the arrival of the next software build and the manual team work through the list of test cases performing the actions defined in the test cases and validating that the test case and hence the software build is operational. This technique requires more domain understanding at the test case creation point and less domain knowledge at the time of execution.

Exploratory testing

Here a manual QA tester that understands the domain of the software fairly well attempts to “break” ( cause a bug to happen) the software. Exploratory testing is an excellent complement to to test case based testing. Together they result in a significant improvement in quality

Automation testing

Since the 1990’s automation testing has risen as strong alternative. In automation testing a software tool is programmed ( In Java for example) to carry out human actions that testers would do in check based testing. The process is typically to first create the test cases like in Manual check based testing and then to program the test cases. Read for more : Test Automation vs Manual Testing

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