According to the recent research, in 2021 the budget for the quality assurance (QA) is going to reach 40 percent of the whole IT project budget. It means that QA is the effective way to exceeds the efficiency of the software project and to reduce the number of the issues on the production.

Let’s figure out the reasons why projects may need a QA team?

A QA team makes a general check before a major release, checks if the software meets the quality standards before the deployment or in the certain picks helps you to prevent the unexpected errors and to improve the user experience. Quality Assurance engineer helps to test your web site, mobile app or even a game and to find out the list of the bugs or to provide the suggestions for the improvement. So, the coding and the testing should be done simultaneously.

By the way, it can be hard to find the experienced QA-enginer in a short term and you need to start searching for him/her as soon as possible. The best option for that is the outsource QA service, as it allows to scale up without the headache of hiring people, without renting office & paying full-time salaries and it helps you to solve the various functional issues. By the way, the Smartexe team has got the highly skilled engineers who have passed the ISTQB-certification, so with us your project will be in safety.

Automated Quality Assurance

Automated testing includes scripts running, that allows comparing the current state of the project with expecting results. It allows checking software for the correct work. The qa automation is better for big and long term projects, repetitive tasks, functional testing, performance or load testing, Advanced GUI Testing. Here is the list of advantages of automated quality assurance.

Pros

• catch bugs earlier;
• eliminate human error, as automation means predictable quality;
• automation has no limitations, so tests can be running 24/7;
• reusable test for code that gets frequent updates;
• compare millions of lines of conversion data without making a mistake.

Cons

• high cost, as the test should be configured due to project-specific;
• not effective for short-term or small projects;
• blind for user-friendly errors;
• leave no room for imagination and exploratory testing;
• can be the reason of crashes as scalability issues grow.

Note, no matter how experienced automated tests are, it is impossible to automate everything.

So what type of testing is better automated or manual? You should choose by yourself in each case. We created the list of questions that will help your to find the answer.

Manual Quality Assurance

When the software testers check the program or the service by hand it is called the manual testing. The manual testing services help to find if the program, the service work appropriately. The manual testing is a start point for the automated one if it is needed.

The main advantage is the real user experience while testing, it helps to find out the bugs in the interface, which can not be detected automatically. Also, the manual testing is the best one for the project in the development stage or adding new features, for checking how user-friendly interface of the program, the website or the application is.

Pros

• usability and visual analysis;
• ability for the small website fixes or the program updates;
• flexibility and adaptability;
• easy user integration and third-party integration for Jira, DevOps, and Slack.

Cons

• human errors while analysing;;
• labor intensity and high resourceability;
• dependance of the results according the type of report.

Manual testing can be not enough to meet the current software development demands, so you will also need to perform an automated testing.

Automated vs Manual

We prepare the checklist that helps you to select the QA-testing type.

1. Is your project still in the development stage?
2. Have you run software testing before?
3. Do you need to improve the time spent doing regression testing after made modifications?
4. Do you have repetitive tasks?
5. Do you need to reduce the time for functional testing, like accuracy, interoperability, compliance, security and stability?
6. Do you need to test the performance at max load and capacity?
7. Are you performing ad-hoc testing without a written test case?
8. Is it a short term project?
9. Do you need testing visual aspects of the project?
10. Do you need to see how your software or app respond to keypad entry?

If your answer have many “yes” to 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10 questions you definitely need automated testing. In other cases manual testing will be enough.

There is no right or wrong solution for software testing, you need to select one type or both according to your budget or project size. In some cases manual testing is not enough, and sometimes vice versa.

The perfect situation is when you use a combination of methods, so you can save time (due to investigation automated testing can save up to 65% of time) and resources.