When say “no” to automated testing?

When say “no” to automated testing?
June 06 09:57 2018 Print This Article

Despite providing a number of advantages, automation of software testing applied to the “improper” project may cause a failure of software release. To avoid such a scenario, you should know when it is better to conduct manual testing instead of test automation.

First of all, automated testing is a rather challenging process as different factors may complicate the process of scripts development. Besides, there are test cases that you’d better not to automate as your effort won’t be justified. Let’s review what tests shouldn’t be automated.

Dynamic elements of websites

JavaScript code, Flash and Silverlight containers, secondary browser windows and other dynamic elements of a website make it difficult to automate the validation of the whole page as well as some of its elements. For example, if you have a website constructor or online editor – software with a drag&drop feature – then the development of automated tests will take some time. Besides, the quality and coverage of such tests will be put into question.

Flash and Silverlight are used to develop multimedia applications that can be implemented in a web page code in a form of special container. Users don’t see anything that happens inside the container. Special engines process the elements. So you don’t have direct access to those elements, and you cannot write scripts. To know more about automation of web testing, watch our webinar.

Mobile test automation

The mobile test automation market is still under development, and nowadays the solutions for mobile testing are rather limited. Appium has some errors and restrictions that prevent effective automation of mobile applications. It is challenging to automate such features as:

  • switching between apps during testing
  • verification of toast notifications
  • software integration with accelerometer
  • location of devices in space
  • physical buttons, etc.

Software with complex logic

You can spend hundred hours on automating the verification of particular functionality, but at the end, your tests may fail. And in the majority of cases, it turns out that manual verification of this feature will be less time and resource consuming.

Media content

You cannot automate the verification of media content, e.g., audio and video files. Nevertheless, libraries and frameworks with Artificial Intelligence elements do exist. But you can apply them to very specific tasks. You can describe the logic that will work in case of system states predefined. But you won’t discover bugs using such scripts. Human needs a second to make sure that a video has started or that image size was changed. There is no need to check all that using test scripts.

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About Article Author

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Helen Johnson
Helen Johnson

has 3-year experince in content managing, skills of copyediting and proofreading of web content and documentation

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