Manual Testing vs Automation testing

Everyone in the testing industry have doubt, is manual testing dying? Will automation take over in the future? Should we use manual testing or automation to test products properly? Both have their own advantages and disadvantages. Let’s discuss “Manual Testing vs Automation testing”.

Manual Testing – In this testing, test cases are executed by test engineers. They manually test products by checking all possible test cases.

Automation Testing – In Automation testing, All the test cases are tested by automated scripts. So based on the given data, all test cases are executed by computers one by one. 

I have created a youtube video to discuss this in detail. You may watch it and please subscribe to the channel

Main Difference between Manual Testing vs Automation testing

	Manual Testing	Automation testing
1.	Not Reliable – Manual testing totally depends on humans. There are many chances that humans will miss some test cases, some permutations, and combinations. There are many factors like human skills, moods, deadlines or laziness that cause him/her to miss or not execute test cases correctly	Reliable – Automation test cases run based on scripts. Whatever test cases are written in scripts or tools, they never miss.
2.	Here the cost of the test depends on the cost of test engineers.	Here the cost of the test depends on the cost of the automation tool.
3.	Time – Manual testing is time-consuming. (they take a break for Coffee! lol)	Time – Automation tools are very fast. They execute test cases one by one without stopping.
4.	Humans don’t like to test the same test cases repetitively.	The automation tool can run the same test case as many times as you want.
5.	Some API testing is difficult for human	Automation tools can do API testing faster and correctly.
6.	Performance testing – like sending 1000 emails from your email app or opening 100 tabs in a browser app and measuring performance is difficult and boring for humans	Automation tools can do all these things faster and correctly.
7.	Test Engineers have their experience. So, from their experience sometimes they identify some corner bugs.	Automation testing is done as per the scripts written. They test with the same flow every time.
8.	Humans can test from customer and end-user perspectives. So, they can observe if some scenarios are not user-friendly or if some color combinations look ugly.	Machines don’t have such brains to identify color combinations or test scenarios end-user perspective
9.	Reporting of test cases depends on human to human.	Automation can do nice reporting with what all steps they executed and what all steps fail at what method.

Summary

Manual testing and automation testing both have their own advantages and disadvantages. Based on product and features one needs to decide how to test the product. Sometimes combine effort is better. For new features, UI verification, Ad-hoc testing, and exploratory testing Manual Testing is better. For Regression testing, Performance testing, and Load testing automation is better.    

Click here to read all software testing articles