The next in the series of articles in the View from Wales Series. The Test and QA Wales meetup group discussed the balance of Automation and Manual testing. Cloud Service by Conduit Global and Acorn Recruitment are delighted to be able to make available this content.

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The Test and QA Wales group met recently to
discuss the benefits of Automated testing over
Manual software testing techniques.
With teams moving towards faster deployment
to decrease time to market and increase return
on investment, testing and QA functions have
increasingly turned to test automation as part
of their solution. The promises of automation
are manifold including reduced execution time,
reduced testing cost, increased coverage; and
better test accuracy to name a few, but is it really
a silver bullet?
Many teams have an assumption that it is
necessary to automate their test cases. However,
there is often a lack of will in the development team
or skills within the existing QA and testing team to
drive changes through in a meaningful way.
The automation process that is employed
will only be as good as the team performing
the automation.
Manual testing is a thoughtful process and allows
a tester to dive deeper into the application than
automation typically does. It enables critical
review of user experience delivery. Often in
manual testing a tester will notice something and
investigate the issue, for instance, image colour
changes or UI component moves. Such findings
are lost with Automation as this will only perform
the checks that it has been specifically told to do.
Automation and manual testing ideally
compliment each other, both adding equal value to
the understanding of quality. The amount of effort
that will be spent producing automated tests and
maintaining them can make it difficult to realise
the benefits if a robust framework is not created.
This coupled with the additional humanistic
testing benefits that manual testing can bring
mean that finding the right balance between the
two is an essential element of project success for
many within the Test and QA Wales group.
Many teams find that manual testing can get
stale. This is particularly true of teams using
formalised manual test scripts. These test
scripts are regularly identified as candidates for
automation, which then frees teams to perform
exploratory testing which is more pro-active
and engaging.
Manual testing with a group of end users is also
considered to be useful. It generates a fresh pair
of eyes, which may drive both new requirement
and defect identification. Here the value is in
interacting with the user although it is often at
the end of the software life cycle. Teams across
the Test and QA Wales group have found that it
is better to draw on the user expertise earlier,
including at the story writing stage.
Test automation is seen as a fast way to perform
a significant number of validations against new
builds of software. There is little doubt that if and
when done well it greatly enhances the capability
of software delivery. It does however continue to
pose challenges to organisations as they adopt
the new processes and procedures to put in place
such a solution.
Whilst the Test and QA Wales group see huge
value in automation, they very much see it as
complimentary to the thought processes involved
in manual software testing, with the two being
hugely complementary to each other.
AUTOMATION VS. MANUAL TESTING