With the rising trend among companies preferring to hire applicants with backgrounds as SDETs over those with only "Manual Testing" experiences backing them up in their portfolios, is it time to watch out for ourselves? Is Manual Testing finally, undeniably, going away for good?

WHAT IS MANUAL TESTING?

Manual Testing, in the context of Software Testing, is one of the processes in software testing that involves performing software tests manually. This is done by a human tester to ensure that the software works as intended and meets the requirements as specified in the requirements documents.

Manual testing involves using manual techniques and tools to test software's functionality, usability, and reliability.

WHAT IS AUTOMATED TESTING?

Automated— as you can guess from its name — is the use of software to run test scripts to test applications for bugs and vulnerabilities instead of having a human intervene to check the results of these tests one by one.

A big reason why companies are shifting to run automated tests is that automated testing can save time and money for the team since it can reduce the amount of time it takes to test a software application and can also be used to execute tests more accurately and consistently compared to manual testing.

Automated testing can also run tests that would be difficult or impossible to perform manually, such as testing multiple versions of a software application simultaneously across different testing environments.

MANUAL TESTING VS. AUTOMATED TESTING: WHICH ONE IS BETTER?

Manual Testing needs to be done to ensure a better user experience and exploration of the application to find loopholes in the logic of the planned test cases for automation testing and ensure that the written automation test isn’t flaky.

It is impossible to test a product through 100% automated testing only as it would need human intervention to execute some tests. Among these are Exploratory Testing and User Acceptance testing. During initial setup, it’s also important for manual testing to be done to figure out how to properly configure the automation tests.

On the other hand, Automated Testing is best used when doing repetitive tests to ensure fewer errors as manual test executions can be prone to human errors. Additionally, it’s helpful to use automation tests for items that are difficult to regularly measure by human abilities, like Regression Tests, Performance Tests, Load Tests, Stress Tests, etc., as well as for reducing testing time by automating test case execution and parallel execution of tests.

While it’s easier to begin testing by having manual testers, in the long run, it’s also easier to run tests using automated test tools and the return on investment would be higher (this is, of course, given the assumption that the tests created are good in the first place).

SO… DO WE STILL NEED MANUAL TESTING?

Although there is already a trend among tech companies involving Software Developers to work not only on writing the code for the application being built but also on writing code to automate the code-checking process before pushing code into the pipeline, there is still a need for specialized Software Development Engineers in Test (SDETs) to write the actual automation testing scripts for the end-to-end tests, among others. This is so the Software Developers can focus their attention on making the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for their release. In contrast, the SDET focuses on making sure that the quality of the code passes the automated checks executed.

Putting that in mind, there is also a need for the expertise of Manual Testers for certain test processes that can't simply be automated. This doesn't mean that Manual Testers have to manually do all Testing-related tasks: of course, technology has already evolved to a point wherein there are Test Management tools and Bug Tracking Tools, among others, that could help Manual Testers make the testing process easier for them and the entire team. But this also doesn't mean that we could already do away with having AIs and Testing Frameworks run all the testing while we sit and wait for the loading screen to show 100% full coverage.

Manual testing is essential to the software development process and should not be overlooked or discounted. Manual testing is vital for ensuring that the software works per its designed specifications, as well as for helping to identify potential issues before the software is launched into production. Additionally, manual testing can help uncover unexpected user behaviors, which can be addressed and corrected before the user experience is negatively impacted.

I hope we all don’t forget that we are testing products for human consumption and usage, not for computer verifiability. It is important to remember that some issues--especially visual ones-- may not be easily noticeable to programming algorithms. Computers still lack that human touch that would help the product get tested for User Acceptance.

CONCLUSION

Manual Testing and Automated Testing are two different sides of the same coin: they might be different in their approaches, but at the end of the day, the goal of using them is to verify that the product is working and is what the customers want and need.

Instead of pitting them against each other and highlighting why one is needed more than the other, it is important to leverage both of these resources to get the best results for testing the product.