Quality Assurance (QA) engineers are responsible for making sure the code other developers write is up to a certain standard. We explore potential problems and bugs in a program and then resolve those problems before the code is pushed to production.
Before a project starts, we collect information about the goals of a project and write policies to prepare for testing. We also set up processes to ensure the code has been reviewed and checked.
Most QA Engineers start this journey as manual testers and the next big step would be automated testing. Let’s see the difference between these two and the benefits when implemented correctly.
First of all we need to put in context what is the difference between automated and manual testing, automated as the name implies it is done automatically this is usually used on repeated tests, like procedures that need to be constantly checked and can be repetitive, manual tests are the ones that are performed by the tester itself.
There are a lot of different aspects of each one that have advantages and disadvantages but we need to keep in mind that both of them consume effort, resources and time.
And the question lingers in the air “Is Automation better than manual testing?” and the answer is yes and no, we need to know when to use both of them, manual testing can provide much faster results with new ideas that need to be tested right away, in that scenario it doesn’t make much sense to set up a whole automated process but then the test can provide faster results and better feedback once the setup is completed.
Automated testing is a really helpful tool and that can be used for better results and have a great feedback, but the setup takes time and it will leave no room for human error, but sometimes the human error will lead to some results that we didn’t think, also with the manual testing you can verify the design.
A great QA Engineer needs both manual and automated skills to deliver a good quality product, automated tests can fail and sometimes it requires more time to review the code to see where it fails and fix it, than do it manually.
To summarize automated testing is an amazing tool to deliver quick results and have better feedback but it needs to be used when needed, manual testing complements the lack of the automated one, with great skills of each one you can deliver a high quality product.
So which one do you think is better?