Is Manual Testing Dying ?

Is manual testing really dying? That’s the question that came to my mind when i read an article on medium which goes by Wonders of Automation Testing.

I’m not an expert in this topic and neither is testing my forte but only because it has automation which automatically becomes the hot topic and that according to me both(manual and automation) are complementary to each other.

Automation testing is well mostly used for regression testing but when it comes to complexity, manual testing is your best friend. You may ask why and the answer to that is automation testing can’t cover 100% of your test cases and this is the reason most companies use it for regression testing only.

Generally if I’m not wrong manual testing is used to cover all test cases first and then automation testing is quickly done to cover most of the areas.

But not to forget when automation is involved in any work-flow it’s hard not to mention the benefits that we get. For example data driven testing, batch testing and the most important part parallel testing. Also we cannot ignore the speed in which we can run some tests to get quick results.

Other comparison could be for the limitation that automation testing has. It currently works only on windows(as of time this article is posted) and well know automation service or IDE like Selenium only supports web application testing. Whereas with manual testing you can test in any environment without any hassle and conduct tests on any type of applications and sites. Automated test lacks interaction with system as a user and will test as commanded or scripted well manual test will interact with the system as a real user would and try to find and catch bugs which is not scripted or mentioned in the test case giving it an upper hand, because some scenarios or specific edge cases can be exposed only when interacted as a real end user and not as a bot.

With the advancement in the technology be it in IT or any other field, companies and clients are trying to incorporate automation in every aspect, be it in deployment, development or testing. Automation helps you with multitasking other then that it also helps you to automate your redundant tasks saving ample time to concentrate more on exploratory and Adhoc testing.

Finally it boils down to the conclusion that even though we have manual testing and automation testing tools, bugs can still happen no matter how big or small your project is, issues will still pop up as no product is 100% bug free and that’s the truth. Decision of weather to go with manual or automation testing will be a part of debate and discussion that each company or organization has to take in order to save money, time and in some case resources. I believe end of the day what it matters is we should be able to find a major issue or a defect in our application or a website to increase the quality by saving time and resources at the same time.

Coming back to the question Is manual testing really dying? i would say no but maybe in future.