AI seems to be the name of the game these days. Regardless of your industry, everyone seems to be obsessed with getting on the AI bandwagon.

There are understandable reasons for this. In many ways, AI is making things easier, faster, and more efficient than ever before. But should we use it in every situation? Not necessarily. Software testing, for example, requires closer attention than many other areas. We’ll tell you why.

Pros and cons of manual testing

There are positives and negatives to manual testing services. While there are a lot of benefits, it pays to look at this method in its entirety and try to form an objective opinion about it. Some of the less positive aspects include:

• Time. Anything that you have to do manually takes a lot of time. This is particularly the case with stress testing (or endurance testing), which can take a long time to check thoroughly.
• Money. Manual testing has typically been very expensive, as well, because it is time-consuming and requires so much effort on the part of testers.
• Labor intensiveness. Manual testing can be very dull and require the people who do it to spend long periods on small, repetitive tasks.

Taking all that into consideration, there are numerous advantages to manual testing. These include:

• Necessary human factor. There will always be aspects of machine development that require some degree of human observation. When testing software, automated systems might be able to tell you that a particular button works, but they won’t be able to speak to aesthetic qualities or user-friendliness fully.
• Adaptability and scalability. When using automated testing, systems go through pre-prescribed processes. They aren’t necessarily designed to work in any particular circumstances because new types of changes are constantly coming out. Changes can be of many sorts: design-related, involving new features, backend changes, etc. This can prevent some automated tests from functioning correctly. With manual testing, you can tweak minor aspects to the desired degree.
• Software is becoming more user-friendly. Coding used to be considered the exclusive realm of a select few, but with low-code and no-code testing tools available now, the testing process is much more widely accessible. For exploratory tests, testers need decision-making skills that require observation and critical thinking. This cannot be accomplished with automated testing.

Pros and cons of automation

Of course, automated testing systems have pros and cons. We certainly don’t want to imply that automating has no benefits because there certainly are. Let’s do a quick summary.

• Speed. Automated testing is the fastest way to perform most types of tests. You can receive feedback almost instantaneously and find out if there are any issues you are facing. As testing mechanisms can continue functioning 24 hours a day, you can potentially get constant feedback on your app and system functionality. It allows for bugs to be caught and taken care of instantly.
• More comprehensive and scalable results. Automated testing allows you to examine multiple aspects of your software and system functionality simultaneously. You can look at large datasets and test different environments simultaneously. You can also simulate various users to test the scalability of your software.
• Fewer errors. Automated testing basically eliminates the possibility of human error. When systems are automated, data goes directly through the processes it ought to and can’t get left out, miscalculated, or put in the wrong place.
• Potential for innovation. When you use automated testing, you can sit back and examine the larger processes involved from a bird’ s-eye view. Testers are free to think of new ideas and ways of doing things, which can help optimize your software and your work in general. Testers can also devise new ways of improving the user experience.

Both styles have merit

You should conclude from these arguments that it is always good to be flexible. You might decide that automated testing is more appropriate for specific situations and manual testing is more appropriate for others. You might even want to use both methods to test a critical application. You should always keep an open mind about what you might need at any given time. While technological progress is excellent, we shouldn’t let it come at the expense of our human ingenuity. We developed all these technologies in the first place, after all.