Why QA teams still need Manual testing?

When we talk about the software development life cycle, testing is one of the most important stages. One of the common discussions that arise among the QA teams is about manual and automated testing. These days a lot of things have been automated so it is kind of expected that automation tools will replace humans in software testing also. But is it so? First of all, let us see the difference between Manual and Automation Testing.

Manual testing involves manually executed test cases by tester without using any automated tools. On the other hand, automation testing is the process of running pre-scripted tests automatically. Both of the mentioned testing types have significant importance and its benefits.

One of the greatest benefits with automation testing is that it helps to save time and costs and also offers a wider test coverage. What is additionally very important is that automation gives us a sense that existing features are not broken because of new feature addition. Automation ensures that defects are found at the early stage and helps in providing reliable results. But even though automation testing has its advantages pure automation testing is never possible.

On the other side, when we talk about manual testing, there are many reasons why manual testing is indispensable and why we still need it in our organizations. In quality assurance, UI plays an important role. This means that in certain tasks, only human can provide an appropriate assessment. When testing UX/UI, a manual tester can spot contextual, functional, visual and usability bugs that automation scripts may not identify.

In some situations, un-automatable scenarios arise, and in this case the time and knowledge of functionality play a major role. With manual testing, there is no need for a tester to set up test cases, program it into the automated tool and then run the tests. The manual tester can easily and quickly test these scenarios and see the results. So automatic tests consume a much more time as testers require the new automation script.

Manual QA testing can be used in both small and big projects and one of its perks is that we can easily update our test case according to project movement while on the other side automation testing can not change course in the middle of a test run to examine something that had not been previously considered.

We can now answer on our question in the first paragraph. Can automation replace humans in software testing? The answer is: not for a very long time. Human brain is irreplaceable. Only a human can create valid test designs, foresee defects and execute designs to get the expected results. Manual testing is essential to ensure a high level of software quality. Human tester will quickly anticipate other failures that sometimes go unnoticed during automation testing and there is no replacement for the human eye.