The world of high technologies is immeasurably diverse. Changes in the usual schemes and approaches occur so often that it is sometimes difficult for even a specialist to keep track of the emergence of new solutions.
Therefore, when it comes to distributing QA tasks between manual testers and those specialists who perform automated tests, it is frequently possible to find unjustified duplication of operations. Sometimes this happens due to the relatively large autonomy of each of the directions. There are also cases when adherents of the first or second testing method consider their approach the most correct and do not want to delegate their tasks to colleagues for replacing this routine with scripts.
However, incomprehension between such teams can result in high, unnecessary financial and temporal costs for software developers.
World experience shows that developers spend 29.5% of their time on API programming. Approximately the same amount of time is spent searching for errors and debugging. Quality Assurance has become an integral step in software development and market launch. Today, 23% of the annual budget of development companies makes up expenses on software testing. And in this context, defining approaches to developing a QA strategy, eliminating duplicate processes, and making existing ones cheaper without compromising quality are issues of economics, not executive discipline.
How can you avoid unnecessary expenditures and unwarrantable waste of time? This is what our article is about.
Understanding of processes and independent expertise is the key to success
The experience of leading QA firms, including QualityLogic, TestFort, TestingXperts and other world-renowned companies, shows that effective coordination of two parallel teams testing specific software is possible in two cases. Either the customer himself has a deep understanding of the intricacies of the process, or independent expertise of QA outsourcing teams is involved in the control.
Of course, the priorities and distribution of responsibilities between the testers teams should not be defined and distributed due to the customer’s personal preferences for one or another type of testing. Planning a strategy for pre-release verification and further QA maintenance of a software product is based on the study of several key metrics.
In particular:
- The economic feasibility of creating an automated test script.
- Complexity and depth of verification.
- Basic software stability. In other words, how stable the system under test is initially and how significant is the influence of external factors on its fault tolerance.
Such an approach, considering all the impossible or too expensive nuances, facilitates a positive user experience, dramatically shortens the software testing period, and frees the customer from unnecessary expenses.
Hard choice. What to give preference to?
Based on the many years of experience of the above-mentioned QA companies, we can confidently say that manual testing https://testfort.com/manual-testing is preferable in cases where the focus is on the research of user characteristics of the product (UI / UX). In addition, if the product involves numerous one-time unique tests, it is evident that their automation will require much more time and money than the initial contact with one of the manual testing companies.
In this case, the following types of manual testing are the most relevant.
- Tester report as user feedback.
- Testing in real-time, without deep code learning, but emphasizing user experience.
- Exploratory testing is a type of validation that favors tester initiative over sequential scripts.
On the other hand, one should not forget about the ambivalence of the human factor. Yes, on the one hand, a person is capable of improvisation. But on the other hand, the need for repeated repetition of routine operations will sooner or later lead to errors.
Thus, the right comprehensive assessment of all pros and cons of both types of testing is the basis for the successful coordination of any QA project.
Not dead rules, but logic and practicality
Let us stress again, we are definitely not talking about categorically abandoning manual testing and relying solely on automatic processes. Or vice versa – in the old-fashioned way to test all programs manually, even where huge amounts of data make a human error, not just factual, but downright predictable. Of course, people write scripts for automation. And what they later entrust to the computer, they can check for themselves. The only question is how often the same action will be repeated and whether it makes sense to write a separate script for it.
Determination of all cases of necessity and expediency is precisely the work of independent experts. As the customer or the head of the testing team, you must have a big picture and understand, based on all the data obtained, how and where the QA process can be optimized.
Summing up
As you will see, some operations can be performed not only by necessity but also by inertia. Therefore, based on your understanding of the situation and on the vision of experts, you will be able to decide what can and should be automated and where manual testing will be the best choice.
