A Good Manual Testing Strategy is Needed for Your Startup

Manual testing is the process through which a software developer carried out manually in order to find defects without the usage of tools or automation scripting. Before manual testing process, a test plan document is prepared that acts as a guide to the testing process in order to have the complete test coverage. Manual testing is a good fit for smaller projects as well as companies without significant financial resources.

In this article, we’ll discuss why you require manual testing services in your IT road-map if you’re a startup, and how it can help you reach your goals.

Limitations of a Startup

Let’s begin by looking at some of the limitations a startup needs to work with.

• Resources: You can’t hire 20 headcounts dedicated to testing on a given project. It is true that most startups are a small group of people that take on multiple roles, mainly because they can’t afford a small army.
  
• Time: You can’t take three months to set up a team and you can’t take eons to deliver. You decide today, you start work today, you deliver yesterday — if that is all possible. In startup universe, every minute counts.
  
• Money: It doesn’t flow from a bottomless cup – there’s a finite amount of it, and unless it’s yours (and most often, even if it is yours), you are held accountable to every single penny. And no, you don’t get personal catering.
  
• Tooling: You can’t have all the best tools in the world; you simply can’t afford them all. Startups thrive on tools from other startups in general, because these are generally free to use (side effect: they’re also buggy because they’re usually very early alpha versions). Where they absolutely need to, startups go for per user licensing or pay-per-use if that is at all possible.
  

Why Manual Testing?

Let me sum it up for you in 4 simple points:

1. Easy exploratory testing: A manual tester not only checks the product in ways already presented to him but also explores it on his own. He can come up with new ways to explore the product, which is also called monkey testing. An automated test cannot do that. It only does what it’s been set up to do.

2. Finds real user issues: Manual testers are human beings just like your end users, so they are more likely to find real user issues. An automated test doesn’t act like a real world user would, and hence, can’t tell you much about your product’s impact on the user.
Manual testing can find bugs likely to be encountered by a real user much more quickly, and allows for expedited changes. It is also much more effective when testing for user-friendliness and a positive experience on the whole. Automatic testing can’t achieve this because of the lack of human observation and intuition.

3. Flexibility: It is not uncommon to get a really great idea at a random moment, and when that happens, you want to get right on to it. You want to test it immediately, because time is of the essence. But this isn’t possible with automated testing. With manual testing, you can start doing it straightaway, but with automated testing, you need to set up test cases and program them into the tools. At times like these, manual testing wins hands down, letting you test ideas quickly and check their feasibility.

4. Economical: Let’s face it. Pretty much every startup wants to save money when starting out. There’s a lot of hit-and-trial in the initial stages, and automation scripts don’t like it when you do that. When running an automated test, you are obligated to keep things the way they are for the most part until the test is complete. If you change your product’s behavior, in all likeliness, all your automation will have to be rewritten, which can be very cumbersome and expensive.