A Comprehensive Guide To Manual Testing: 4 Things To Know

Quality is a must attribute for a successful application. Releasing an app in the market without subjecting it to rigorous testing standards may cause it to affect the end-user experience. Hence, it can hamper your customer retention and conversion rates. The competition in the mobile app market is intense, and stakeholders must test the app for errors and bottlenecks before releasing comprehensively. The main goal of mobile app testing is to ensure easy-to-support code for the app as per the established standards. It also helps determine that the app functionalities are according to the specifications. App testing enables you to spot bugs quickly and fix them immediately before it accumulates and contribute to broken functionality or performance.

The app market’s highly competitive supply and demand require you to effectively test your application system for quality, usability, and security. It will help you ensure that your app meets and exceeds customer expectations. App testing is vital to provide an app’s survival in today’s market. To assess its compatibility, usability, and consistency, you need to check the app against various mobile devices, browsers, operating systems, and combinations. The test engineers are increasingly leveraging automation in-app testing methods to increase testing speed, efficiency, and accuracy. Test automation helps to execute tests automatically via test automation frameworks.

A Mobile app testing company provides robust and comprehensive testing solutions to test the app and optimize it before its release extensively. They effectively combine both manual and automation testing to determine that the app delivers expected performance and has a proper inner structure. Automation testing brings value to the testing process, but one should not consider it a substitute for manual testing. Manual testing helps to check an application system against functional and non-functional requirements by hand. The testers execute the test cases or scenarios manually without using any ready-made tools and verify the test results to validate the app’s features and functionalities. Manual testing helps establish that the app’s behavior is aligned with the predefined, expected behavior set during the initial phases of the mobile development lifecycle.

Manual Testing Activities

• Requirements Analysis: The QA should have a comprehensive understanding of the application under test (AUT) to identify the deviations or errors. Hence, the thoroughly documented specifications are essential for manual tests.
• Test Cases Creation: As per the functional specifications, the test engineers must create a set of test cases for the AUT. The test cases must cover significant features and design elements of your product.
• Conducting The Tests: Once the QA prepares the test cases or scenarios, they need to understand what to check and accordingly execute the tests.
• Logging Bug Reports: Documenting existing bugs and errors in the app is imperative. It helps save time and money and rectify the issues faster.

Types Of Manual Testing

There are different types of manual testing, which includes:

• Unit testing helps to validate an individual software component or module.
• Integration testing helps test the subsystem comprising of two or more integrating components. It enables you to identify issues in the interfaces and the interactions among integrated features.
• System Testingtests the app system in its entirety.
• User Acceptance Testing enables the client to certify that the app system delivers upon the requirements specifications.
• Black Box Testinginvolves testing an app without knowledge of its internal codes and structure.
• White Box Testing helps to strengthen the app’s security features and improve its design and usability. The internal codes and structure of the application systems are known to the tester.

Why Is Manual Testing Important?

• Human Perspective:Humans can better evaluate the look and feel of an app. It provides better validation from the end-users perspective. It helps to simulate a real-life environment in which one will use the app. Manual tests facilitate true-to-life testing.
• Lower Short-Term Investment:Manual testing does not require you to invest in special tools with high initial costs. Specialized tools need you to hire professionals and additional resources. Manual testing does not require any upfront costs and makes it easy to manage a budget.
• Increased flexibility:It is easier for manual testers to react to the slightest requirement changes instantaneously. Hence, it offers better flexibility in the testing process.
• Un-Automatable Scenarios: You cannot automate the entire test suite. There can be multiple scenarios that are not worth automating and will not yield desired results. Hence, manual testing is essential for such test cases.

How To Perform Manual Testing?

• Using the requirement analysis step, gather the requirements. It will help you know when and what you should test for the given application.
• Identify and draft the test cases for covering the listed requirements. Once test cases are ready, the stakeholders must review them thoroughly.
• Set up the testing environment and sequentially execute the test cases. Identify the state of the test cases, if it is failed, passed, or skipped.
• Prepare a report of the identified bugs and defects once you identify them.
• Create a detailed test report detailing important information about the test case status, defects, and more. It will help to reverify the app until it yields successful results.

To Conclude:

These are a few essential aspects to understand manual testing. Manual testing is critical to the app testing process to validate the app and maximize its receptivity in the target marketplace.