When is Manual Testing Better Than Automated?

July 03 10:00 2015 by Nataliia Vasylyna Print This Article

A lot of activities performed during software testing are automated. This allows to complete various tasks during mobile application testing, desktop testing, web site testing and detect all the important software bugs in no time.

It is known that despite efficiency of automated testing not all the activities can be automated, in some situations automated tests become useless.

Situations When Automated Tests are Ineffective:

When something goes wrong, automated tests fail and do not continue the verification until the issue is corrected regardless of the issue significance. It may be more important to perform the rest of the tests than to fix the found defect at the moment, but automated tests do not skip issues.
When there is too little time, the system was changed a little bit or due to other reasons some tests become inapplicable and must be edited or excluded. Automated tests are created beforehand and such minor corrections may require considerable efforts and time.

Besides, sometimes a fresh eye is needed for thorough verification of the application. New ideas and approaches allowing increasing the test coverage can be invented by testers in course of exploratory testing of the system which is always carried out manually.

So, among considerable drawbacks of automation is a lack of flexibility.