Software testing is an integral part of a successful project/product delivery. It is the process of evaluating your software functionalities to validate if they are working as expected. A report from Statista states that around 23% of an organization’s annual IT budget is allocated towards quality assurance and testing1. Rightly so, because quality software opens the door for organizations to compete effectively and offer a great customer experience.
With software testing seeing increased adoption, its market size exceeded USD 40 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 6% from 2020 to 20262.
Software testing is broadly classified into manual testing and automated testing. In this blog, we’ll discuss the primary differences between them and how to choose the one that fits your requirements.
What is Manual Testing?
As the name suggests, manual testing involves quality assuring the software manually with the help of a testing team. In manual testing, test engineers write the script for various scenarios, prep the data, and run the tests. This is followed by validating the results with the expected result for correctness.
When Should You Opt for Manual Testing?
- Usability testing: To measure the user-friendliness of an application.
- Exploratory testing: To check the functionalities of the system on the fly without any specific requirements.
- Ad-hoc testing: To test an application randomly without a set scenario.
What is Automated Testing?
Automated testing involves using an automation solution to develop the scripts and validate the correctness of the applications. As against manual testing, automated testing requires minimal human intervention.
When Should You Opt for Automated Testing?
- Regression testing: To validate the functionalities of the entire system after making minor or significant modifications. Since regression testing is done repeatedly, using automation makes it efficient.
- Cross-platform testing: To check if an application works across many platforms or if multiple applications spanning various platforms perform as expected.
- Performance testing: To determine the stability, speed, and scalability of an application.
- Load testing: To determine if the system is capable of handling the desired load.
Top Seven Key Differentiators of Manual and Automated Testing
| Parameter | Manual Testing | Automated Testing |
| Time | Time-consuming, as it entirely relies on human resources. Regression and integration testing take the longest time since they involve running repetitive tests. | Way faster and hassle-free, especially when the automation solution is no-code. You can test end-to-end business processes with a single click of a button. |
| Effort | Tedious, as you have to deploy a quality assurance team to drive the entire testing process. | Easy, since all the testing efforts are reduced to a click of a button enabling you to do higher-value and rewarding tasks. |
| Accuracy | Prone to human errors, impacting the accuracy and reliability of the application. | Highly accurate and reliable as there is no chance for human errors. |
| Cost | Not cost-effective for large-volume regression testing. The initial investment is lower, ROI is lower in the long run. | Effective for large-volume and ineffective for small-volume regression testing. The Initial investment is higher, ROI in the long run is higher. |
| Report readiness | The test results are not readily available in the system since they are usually recorded in a spreadsheet. | The test results are readily available in the system and can be utilized by anyone in the team. |
| UI-readiness | The user-friendliness of the application can be thoroughly validated through manual testing. | Automated testing cannot assure user-friendliness since there is no human intervention involved. |
The Bottom Line
Automation is a prime necessity for agile development, DevOps, and continuous delivery. With organizations focusing on these three parameters more than ever, it only makes sense to automate everything that can be automated. Manual testing is slow, tedious, and error-prone – making automation indispensable.
Avo Assure test automation solution is a no-code, intelligent, and heterogeneous solution, enabling you to achieve more than 90% test automation coverage. It works seamlessly across any platform and environment, helping you test repetitively without writing a single line of code and being 2x more productive.
With Avo Assure, our customers have reduced the production defects to as less as 2% and achieved cost benefits of over 63%.
See how Avo Assure can help you transform your business. Schedule a demo today.
