When working on a software development team, no matter which part of the team your are on, there is a common belief that all the people on the team should have. This  belief is that testing is extremely important and should be executed in the most accurate manner. You want your software to be reliable, successful, and help you and your team build a sustainable brand. Usually the competition is between manual, automated and crowdsourced. 

The common problem that this kind of teams have is the type of QA (Quality Assurance) testing that they should go for.

There are three types of QA testing, each of them being used in today’s industry and each of them working effectively depending on a number of different key factors. In this article, we’ll list pros and cons for each type of QA testing, trying to give you a comprehensive overview of the entire concept:

Manual Testing

First and foremost, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, more exactly, to manual testing.

When it comes to manual testing, there is an actual person, named a QA Analyst, who is designated to discover bugs in software that is under development. This person has to check all the essential features of an application, without using any automation software testing tools.

Now let’s list some pros and cons of manual testing:

PROS:

• • The visual feedback is fast and accurate.
  • Least expensive.
  • The benefit of the human judgement and intuition.
  • No need for code.

CONS:

• The least reliable method. It’s prone to human mistakes.
• The process can’t be recorded.
• Sometimes, some tasks are more difficult to perform manually, which could be time consuming.

Automated Testing

Things with automated testing are pretty straight forward: there are people who write code/scripts, meant to automate the test execution. This type of testing relies entirely on pre-scripted test, which runs automatically and it is meant to compare the actual results with the expected results.

Now let’s list some pros and cons of automated testing:

PROS:

• • Finds more bugs than human testing.
  • Speedy and efficient process.
  • It can be recorded and the scripts can be reused.
  • It works continuously, without the human need of resting and taking breaks.
  • It increases productivity because of the speedy process.

CONS:

• Given the fact that there’s no humans, it is harder to get insights on the visual aspects of your UI.
• Sometimes, the tools needed for automated testing can increase the total cost of the project.
• It is still a limited concept.
• Debugging is a huge problem, and a very time consuming one.

Crowdsourced Testing

Being the latest addition to the testing industry, crowdsourced testing implies delegateing testing tasks to a group of experts that will make sure that a software has the right quality. Even though it’s still not the most popular solution, it’s emerging quickly and shows good results, especially when it comes to crowdsourced mobile app testing.

Now let’s list some pros and cons of crowdsourced testing:

PROS:

• It can be extremely fast, with accurate results returned in less than 24 hours.
• It can actually be pretty cheap.
• It is especially great for small teams, who don’t have enough time or enough team members to do everything. Employing a crowdsourced approach is the best option for these people.

CONS:

• Bugs are caught later in the development process.
• Not every test is suitable for crowdsourced testing. If a certain test is has a length of more than 10 steps, there’s a possibility of tester error.
• Testers often have problems when it comes to communicating to each other and exchange information, especially if they are situated in different time zones.

At the end of the day, no matter which type of QA testing your team goes for, you have to remember one thing: testing is a crucial part of any software development process.

When it comes to choosing one of the three types of QA testing, it often depends of many aspects, like project budget, number of people in a team and the period of time a team has to complete a project. On one side, there is a strong reason why manual testing is still efficient and still chosen by a good number of developing teams out there. On the other side, automated testing has its benefits, and its power is more than obvious. But then again, only certain teams can afford it or actually need. Also, crowdsourced testing should not be avoided, as it opens up a new door for the future of QA testing.

Milos Mudric

Milos Mudric is a content specialist and tech enthusiast. He is the founder of Silver Fox Digital and he occasionally writes interesting stories about Blockchain, IoT and Fintech.