In this blog, we will take a look at manual testing and the benefits it brings for startups. We will discuss why you need to incorporate it in your IT roadmap and how it can assist you to reach your goals.
Limitations of startups
Let’s start with the factors which will be considered as a limitation for startups:
- Resources : Companies can not allocate more number of dedicated testers for a given project. It is true that most of the startups are a small group of professional people that take on multiple roles, because they can’t afford a large set of resources to a single project.
- Time : Companies can’t take more time to set up a team and can’t take very long time to deliver. We have to decide today, start work today, and start delivery from day one. In the startup world, every second matters.
- Money : The utmost factor which plays a vital role in terms of recruiting testers in a startup is “Money”. Startup companies pay more attention towards the allocation of funds for the recruitment of testers because they want their developers themselves to be good testers; but it won’t be true in all circumstances.
After seeing the above limitations, here we see how manual testing benefits for a Startup:
Startups do not overlook any habitual IT project task just because it is conventional. They will consider the benefits or pros that any of the activities will bring to the table, and whether such activities can be substituted by other faster and/or better ways.
In that note, let’s see why you need to create manual testing into your plan and how it can help:
Manual Testing is indispensable
Manual testing plays a primary role in an IT project’s success. It’s ridiculous to consider delivering a project without doing enough manual testing. As we’ve seen above, and as you will know from your own experience, the world isn’t yet ready to pass on manual testing.
Manual testing puts code through real-world testing. This is something test automation cannot do by itself. Automation code typically looks out to execute a specified scenario and thereby, checks for a specific result. It cannot learn to adapt, change behavior, and expect different results.
There is nothing to replace the human brain and until the machines take over completely, you need humans to run spontaneous manual tests that help to find out bugs hidden in your code which otherwise would go unidentified with automation. Unscripted anomalies are an unknown concept for automation code.
Dominance of Manual Testing in Product Development
If you’re a startup, then you’re putting in hard work to build a product iteration good enough:
- To either give a demo to the investors, or
- To launch alpha, beta versions into the intended market.
In both scenarios, it is speed that is of utmost importance. You will need to continuously code, test, and circle back to code.
Apparently, you need a skilled Scrum team who can work effectively in order to build automation code together with the rest of the dev efforts. You also need your team to have the skills to perform different types of manual testing to ensure the quality of a deliverable.
Such on-the-fly testing efforts are essential for product development to be successful at an early stage.
Think Integration Testing, Think Manual Testing
It has been proven time and again that automation is mainly suitable for regression testing. Further than this, when you need to perform an E2E tests and integration tests, efforts with regards to test automation would not deliver positive results that validate the effort that goes into creation of automation code. The best way to run integration and interface tests, is still manual testing. Particularly when you’re working with legacy systems/applications
Conclusion
The intention of this post is to give a heads up about the importance of manual testing to the start-ups. There are chances to win the market without a manual testing team but the startups which have a good manual testing team will win the market as well as the client satisfaction.
