Every organization needs testing of their product and every organization has their own testing team to test the product before its release. But sometimes happens due to tight deadlines you can’t test the complete product manually only or sometimes you miss bugs while in manual testing because human makes mistakes. For the manual testing, tester just sits and test complete application manually, check forms with input combinations, test application with different scenarios etc. Sometimes you need to test the application also in multiple environments like for mobile app you should test on different devices with different resolutions as well. It’s very tough to test the things like this on small deadlines and sometimes also impossible with large deadlines as well. So, when things got tough for a tester with manual testing, automation is always a saviour. What is automation – As the name itself says it’s something that works automatically and reduces human efforts. Initially, test automation requires many efforts but later in the future efforts pays off. Automation testing includes Functional Testing, Regression Testing, Integration Testing, Unit Testing, Smoke Testing, Black box testing and many other types of testing as well.
Manual testing is a very slow and boring task, talking about sitting in one place and testing the application with different possibilities, sometimes happen you might miss a bug as well while doing testing. Before every release, doing manual testing is time-consuming and it’s hard to test application with each and every environment in short deadlines. It also requires high human efforts to complete things quickly and increase the cost as well. While the automation testing scripts are prepared once and can be reused any time like before any release, with very little human efforts. So, fewer efforts will save time as well as cost. You can run automation from anywhere also like with CI Jenkins, you can make run automation testing at night and can find the result on the other day morning, which also saves your time.
The main goal for any product is its release, it’s always needed the product release on time. Automation testing is the best way to reach that goal by checking continuous system integration as well as system stability. Automation testing is also reliable than working on boring manual tasks, sometimes happen doing manual testing on the same module for a long time, the tester can’t find issues from that module, but automation testing can easily find issues from those modules without missing them. Another goal of automation testing is less human efforts. For automation testing, you need only one automation engineer to prepare and run the automation testing scenarios. With this, you can give extra human resources and efforts with other projects and challenging tasks and so save money as well.
In manual testing sometimes on quick releases, few of the functionalities (large and complex) are skips due to the small timeline, but via automation, you can test complete things in no time as well as you can check the databases, files, internal programs quickly and can post the result in very less time than manual testing. Test automation allows performing different types of testing efficiently and effectively. By manual testing, you can test with only a few users and you can’t check the stress in the system with that, but via automation, you can test the application with hundreds or even with thousands of users simultaneously and can test the stress of the system as well. This is what manual testing can’t do.
Automation testing also helps the developer to debug their code and find the bug. It’s too quick than manual testing as manual testing requires more effort for developers as well to debug the bugs. Not yet complete, it’s a very lengthy process to test the application in each and every device and different environments also sometimes it’s an impossible task. This thing can be automated easily and automation testing can work on many devices together and complete testing on time without any extra efforts.
Though automation testing has large benefits area everything has a downfall as well and so as automation testing also. You can’t test few things by automation testing, it only requires manual user efforts. The main requirement of automation to test the happy flows of the application like login to the application, register the user, do some specific functionalities etc. This is what automation do, you can’t test the application with all the different logics via automation that you can do with manually only. Another thing that automation testing can’t do is UI testing or cross-browser testing, you can’t say via automation testing where the buttons or fields are situated on the page, it’s only can work out with manual testing. Automation testing is not still so smart that it can’t test the few scenarios which lead to the system crashes as well.
In final conclusion, everything has two sides. If automation testing has many benefits while doing testing but also has some drawbacks which only require manual testing, and for that manual testing is still be used vastly before the automation testing in the market, also to make your software bug free and to achieve the best result for your software you should rely on both, Manual Testing as well Automation Testing.
Manual Testing use to test the complex scenarios as well to reproduce the bugs, while automation requires doing some repetitive task and testing the positive flow of application as part of a sanity test
