If you decide to work in QA, you’ll soon be overwhelmed with information, technical terms and specialized software. That’s why important thing is to learn basics as soon as possible. The best choice is to start with manual testing. No fancy automation, no special programs to learn, only you and the software you’re testing.
Manual testing is the oldest and most rigorous type of software testing. Manual testing requires a tester to perform manual test operations on the software without the help of Test automation. Manual testing is a laborious activity that requires the tester to possess a certain set of qualities; to be patient, observant, speculative, creative, innovative, open-minded, resourceful, un-opinionated, and skillful.
When you’re doing manual testing, some of the most basic task you’ll perform are:
- Understanding the functionality of program
- Preparing a test environment
- Executing test case(s) manually
- Verifying the actual result:
- Record the result as Pass or Fail
- Make a summary report of the Pass and Fail test cases
- Publish the report
- Record any new defects uncovered during the test case execution
There is no complete substitute for manual testing. Manual testing is crucial for testing software applications more thoroughly. Test automation has become a necessity mainly due to shorter deadlines for performing test activities, such as regression testing, performance testing and load testing.
Manual Testing: Manual testing is a testing technique, where test engineer test the software manually. The test engineer, who carries out all the test cases and executes on the application manually, step by step and indicates whether a particular step was accomplished successfully or whether it failed, performs manual testing. At the time of manual testing tester need only test case and with the information how to execute those test case. Test Complete gives you an opportunity to create and manage manual tests when testing your application. After adding a Manual Testing project item to your project, you can create a collection of steps to be performed when the application is being tested, with a description and detailed instructions for each step. Test case is also written for all type of testing according to test strategy of test plan. Test engineer writes test cases on base of design document of the software. Manual testing is always a part of any testing effort. It is especially useful in the initial phase of software development, when the software and its user interface are not stable enough, and beginning the automation does not make sense.
Key Features
Advantages:
- Manual testing can be used in both small and big project
- Easy to learn for new people who are entering QA waters
- Manual is more reliable then automated (in many cases automated doesn’t cover all cases)
- It allows the tester to perform more ad-hoc. In my experience, more bugs are found via ad-hoc than via automation. And, the more time a tester spends playing with the feature of the software so he gets few user level bugs
Disadvantages:
- GUI object size difference, color combination, etc. is not an easy find in manual testing.
- Actual load and performance is not possible to cover in manual testing for large number of users.
- Running tests manually is a very time consuming job.
- A typical testing life cycle is as follows:
- Test Plan
- Test Development
- Test Execution
- Analyse Results
- Defect Tracking
- Summarise Report
Test Plan :
It is a document which describes the testing environment, purpose, scope, objectives, test strategy, schedules, milestones, testing tool, roles and responsibilities, risks, training, staffing and who is going to test the application, what type of tests should be performed and how it will track the defects.
Test Development :
- Preparing test cases
- Preparing test data
- Preparing test procedure
- Preparing test scenario
- Writing test script
Test Execution:
In this phase we use the documents that we prepared in test development phase. To make things easier to track we just write the short results into the correspondent field in the table.
Analyse results:
Once we get all the results written into the document it is time to analyze them and prepare a bug report, if we encountered any bugs during our testing.
Bug Tracking:
Whenever we get bug in the application we need to prepare the bug report file and forward it to Test Team Lead and Dev Team. The Dev Team will fix the bug. Then the retesting of the application is carried out.
Summarize Reports:
- Test Reports
- Bug Reports
- Test Documentation
These are some of the basics of manual testing and, in general, the basics of any QA job you might want to undertake. Just remember to make your bug reports easy to read and understand. This will raise the quality of your work and allow developers to make faster and more precise bug repairs.
There are also specialized programs which record your every step during application testing so you can more easily track bugs, write reports and generally have a better overview of the current status of testing. Although they help immensely during testing, the best strategy is to first get yourself familiar with all of the basic concepts of manual testing, before stepping on to specialized programs.
The last thing you’ll need before you start testing is a good screenshot capture and/or video capture application. Since you always need to include at least a screenshot of the encountered bug in your bug report, the easy to use capture application becomes a necessity. There are also situations where words and a screenshot can only do so much in explaining the encountered problem. That’s where video capture programs come in handy. If you want to make sure to show what the exact bug is or exact steps you undertook, you will need to record a short video in which you’re recreate the bug you’re reporting. It can easily save you and the developer a lot of trouble and wasted time on explaining to each other what is actually the problem you encountered.
There is a lot of information to find about and learn in QA jobs. The more you learn the application you’re testing, the more bugs you will uncover and report, thus making that application quality rise.
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9 thoughts to “Manual testing”
nice article.
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Thanks 🙂
Great content. Thanks for sharing this information. Keep it up.. This is very effective article. I like it very much.
Thanks 🙂
Very Informative article for beginners. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for good reading, but I`d like to add that manual testing often deeply relies on proper testing software, according to my own experience. It is OK to use something like Google sheets or smth else, but really good thought is to use a specialized QA soft. I, myself, was using EasyQA and was pretty satisfied with the result, hope it`ll come in handy to you too.
Thanks for your reply! 🙂
Thank for the suggestions as well. We will spare a little time to check how it works.
I am working as manual tester and I am interested in Automation testing.can you please guide me which tools are having demand in the market.
Thanks for sharing this blog post. I am a testing. nice to read this article.
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