Automation Testing vs Manual Testing: which one to choose?

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Software testing is a huge domain which has gained interest among young professionals and many experts in the IT sector. Now the question is What is software testing?  It is an integral part of any project. It is a process of checking, verifying, and validating the necessity of the product which is done during the software development. In earlier years testing was done manually. Then came automation testing in the scenario and things changed. The purpose is to find whether the developed software has met the specified requirements or not and to know the defects to ensure that product is error -free. It is specified into two areas which is Manual testing and Automation testing. Both have their pros and cons, but it is worth identifying the difference between both. The only issue is for organization is to understand which method will best suit the situation. Read this informative blog to explore the difference between manual and automated testing.

What is manual testing?

It is a classical method of testing of the software where test is executed manually by an experienced tester with an aim to discover bugs in software under development. Here the skills, knowledge and experience of the testers play a vital role in manual testing to check all the essential features of the given software. In this process, no support from tools or scripts is used which makes the process time consuming.

What is Automation Testing?

Use of automation tools (software and scripts) for executing for test cases is known as automated testing. The objective is to do test execution of repetitive task and regression test without the intervention of manual tester in a less amount of money. Here we need resources with the knowledge of scripting etc.

Let us see how both these testing types are different from each other-

 

Manual Testing	Automation Testing
Execution of test cases done manually.	Execution of test cases done with the help of tools.
Less reliable	More reliable
Less expensive	More expensive
Time consuming	Take less time to execute cases.
Less accurate	Accurate results
Exploratory testing is possible	Does not allow random testing
Cannot be batched.	Can batch multiple test scripts for nightly execution.
Suited for exploratory, usability, And Ad hoc testing.	Suited for regression testing, performance testing or Load testing.
It has a higher risk of missing out the pre-decided test deadline.	Have a zero risk of missing out a pre-decided test.

Which one to choose?

As stated, testing is a huge domain and there are many factors you should consider when choosing your testing strategy. Manual testing is still as important as automation. There are many types of testing where manual testing can only work. Automation tools also have some limitation but eventually, they will become smarter. Both have their pros and cons and which to choose depends upon the project requirements. We can suggest this that when we require skilled tester then we can select manual testing and where we require to automate the test case, we should go for automation.

 

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