Manual Testing vs Automation testing

Everyone in test industry have doubt, is manual testing dying? Will automation take over in future? Should we use manual testing or automation to test product 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 product by checking all possible test cases.

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

Main Difference between Manual Testing vs Automation testing

	Manual Testing	Automation testing
1.	Not Reliable – Manual testing totally depends on human. There are many chances that human will miss some test cases, some permutation and combinations. There are many factors like human skills, moods, dead lines or laziness cause him/her to miss or not execute test cases correctly	Reliable – Automation test cases runs based on scripts. Whatever test cases written in scripts or tool, they never miss.
2.	Here the cost of test depends on cost of test engineers.	Here the cost of test depends on the cost of automation tool.
3.	Time – Manual testing is time consuming. (they take break for Coffee! lol)	Time – Automation tools are very fast. They execute test cases one by one without stop.
4.	Humans don’t like to test same test cases repetitively.	Automation tool can run same test case as many time 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 mails from your email app or opening 100 tabs in browser app and measure 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 done as per scripts written. They test with same flow every time.
8.	Humans can test from customer and end user perspective. So, they can observe if some scenarios are not user friendly or if some colour combinations looks ugly.	Machines don’t have such brain to identify colour combination or test scenarios end user perspective
9.	Reporting of test cases depends 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 need to decide how to test the product. Sometime combine effort is better. For new features, UI verification, Ad-hoc testing, exploratory testing Manual Testing is better. For Regression testing, Performance testing , Load testing automation is better.    

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