Manual Software Testing Services

Software developers intuitively know that they need to test their solutions but aren’t always sure about the best way to proceed, if they should go in for manual software testing or automated software testing or for scripted testing or exploratory testing.

There are numerous other possibilities and choices to consider too. Navigating through the variety of choices for choosing the approach that best fits your situation can be really challenging.

A path that many solution developers often choose is manual software testing, because it’s an easy to start, approachable option.

To ensure if manual software testing services are worthy for your project, it is significant to comprehend the goals you wish to achieve and what kinds of projects shall fit fine for manual testing.

This also makes sure that manual software testing will work good for you, and that you implement your testing efforts suitably to meet your objectives.

Why – What goals should you follow?

Manual testing, in particular, is software testing, so it shares some common goals with any testing effort along with other goals, especially related to manual testing.

Some testing goals that manual testing shall achieve for you are:

Measuring Quality Accurately Provide Coverage and Traceability Be Reliable and Repeatable

Measuring Quality Accurately This is the number one job for any

testing effort. If the results don’t tell you if your solution is correct or not, then it is difficult to say that you have received value from your testing.

The key point that is often missed knows what determines correct behavior, to begin with. There are different options to determine the correct system behavior, such as training materials, formal requirement specifications, user manuals and other forms of documentation.

More important than which ones to use is to choose the most detailed and functional description available, and use them steadily to decide what tests you should run and in what way to determine if they pass.

Provide Coverage and Traceability You would want to connect your tests back to

the source used to identify them. This way, you can tell when you have adequate tests to check the entire solution completely or make an intentional decision to leave the less-important areas without tests.

With this connection, back to the functional documentation in place, you can also govern what amount of the system you have tested by implementing a certain set of tests. Besides, when you run a test that fails and create a defect to track errors, you will want to connect the defect to the test that created it.

This way, you can tell which tests are required to be repeated to validate the fix for the defect and identify the possibly unstable areas of the system which may need further testing by detecting the functional portions of the system that tend to have high numbers of defects.

Be Reliable and Repeatable You will likely need to implement your manual tests more than

once, either after the defects have been identified (and corrected) or for future releases of the solution.

It is important to be able to execute the test in the same way every time to ensure a consistent measurement of the solution quality.

Else, variations in how a test is performed could lead you to conclude that a defect has been corrected when it hasn’t, or that the functionality was broken by a recent change when it wasn’t.

The key to making your testing reliable and repeatable is to document the written test cases with a formal structure for the main body of the tests.

By writing down the tests in detail, you will be able to ensure that even when the tests are run repeatedly by different testers (and at different times), you will get consistent results that support apples-to-apples evaluation of the quality of the solution.

An additional key for repeated testing is to include steps that reproduce the defects that you created while testing. When re-executing the test, it also allows the tester to reliably validate that the defect has been fixed.

Some more specific goals of manual testing to bear in mind are:

Try Unexpected Scenarios Gauge User Experience

Try Unexpected Scenarios Though automated testing can hasten

the use of detailed formal test cases, there also lies value in attempting the unplanned test scenarios to see how the solution responds to the unforeseen user inputs or actions.

This ‘off the map’ kind of testing is known as exploratory testing, and human manual testers particularly are good at it. Humans have an inimitable ability to observe how a test shall proceed, noting if something doesn’t feel right and asking ‘What would happen if I tried doing this?’

This can be a significant enhancement, not a replacement for the documented test cases identified previously.

Gauge User Experience

Automation testing has numerous benefits but has a unique strength of assessing the user experience of using a software solution.

Since the user experience is defined as an easy and intuitive software solution for a human to use, a human tester will certainly be much better at assessing this than an automated test script.

Automated test scripts would not be able to tell you if a given process doesn’t flow well, or isn’t freely understood by a user, or is visually unpleasant. For solutions where user experience is an important component, BugRaptors provides matchless manual software testing services with abilities to verify that the user experience is on board.

When and What Projects are apt for Manual Testing?

There are a number of factors that a team thinks through when choosing the best testing approaches. While no approach works sufficiently in all circumstances and often has tradeoffs in situations, there are vibrant markers that indicate that a project can be a good fit for manual tests.

Below are some to use in evaluating your project:

Is the solution new and experiencing significant change in user interface and functionality?

Is user experience an important concern? Is the solution occasionally updated? Is the solution one of the less critical applications? Is the functional path of the system highly variable? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes”, then manual

testing is definitely going be a good fit for your project!