In the software industry, manual testing is heavily utilized. As of today, manual testing will not be eliminated completely. Teams utilize manual testing for complex test scenarios, the initial setup for automation scripts when the application isn’t stable and when automation is deemed as expensive. Therefore, the Quality Engineering teams continue to add people and work longer hours.
One of the downsides to manual testing is when an application change. Depending on the scenario there may be changes to the test suite. The impact to existing test scripts may require steps to be added or removed from a few test scripts. Most of the time this is updated by hand. Updating test scripts by hand is good for a few, but when testing need a quick turnaround and there are over 50 or more test scripts, team members will be pulled from current work to make the changes. A couple of things to consider while manual testing is still a thing:
Be sure all test scripts are in a central repository that can be automatically updated by the team and not sitting on a person local machine in a spreadsheet.
Create a separate login script for an application. By keeping the “login modular” separate in manual or automated tests, then you only have to change it once if the login steps/page change.
A goal of application testing is to provide a joyful error free user experience once the application is released for public or private consumption.
Lastly, as you consider moving your team to automation testing, reach out to the IBM DevOps Automation Team. We are here to assist you and your team to automate repetitive manual test scripts for early and faster execution while observing and modifying changes using your CI/CD pipelines.
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Lettie Ar-Rahmaan, MSIS CTFL
Product Manager, Rational Test
IBM DevOps Automation
willetta@us.ibm.com
#RationalTest#CI/CD#IBMDevOpsAutomation