Friday, July 16, 2010

Manual or Automated testing

I have done several years of Quality Assurance of Enterprise software and have experienced all common or not so common blocker in software development life cycle.I often encounter a question how much testing we can automate and how much can be done manually.Automated and manual has their own advantage and disadvantage.Automated testing are really helpful to make regression cycle shorter when used for mature product however they can't be used in the product which still going through frequent development process.Automated testing helps to avoid human error and omission .Manual testing are really helpful when used in testing new feature or functionality in a software,however in manual testing a tester or QA person can skip or forget the test step which may generate false positive test defect.

In my opinion automated and manual testing compliment each other they are not mutually exclusive to each other.