10 Key Types of Manual Testing Every QA Should Know

In today's software testing world, manual testing and automated testing often go hand in hand. While automated testing helps save time and effort for repetitive tasks, the various types of manual testing each play an important role in evaluating aspects that machines can hardly replace. Let's explore the definition and benefits of manual testing for QA engineers.

What is Manual Testing?

Manual testing is a process where software applications are tested manually to identify defects. It involves a human tester operating the software without the use of automated tools, simulating real-world usage scenarios to ensure the application meets its requirements. There are various types of manual testing in software development used in the software testing process, each focusing on a specific aspect of the application. 

Manual testing is crucial in software quality assurance (QA) as it allows testers to identify issues that may not be detected by automated methods, including those related to usability testing, user interface manual testing, and accessibility.

Benefits of Manual Testing for QA Engineers

1. Human Intuition and Adaptability: Manual testing leverages human creativity and decision-making skills, making it ideal for identifying issues that are not easily scripted, such as usability flaws and unexpected bugs.
2. Exploratory Testing Relevance: In dynamic projects, manual testing is invaluable for exploratory testing, enabling testers to investigate software without predefined test scenarios.

Common Types of Manual Testing in Software Development

Black Box Testing: 

Black box testing is one of the types of manual testing that focuses on testing the software's functionality from the user's perspective, ignoring the internal code structure. Testers are only concerned with the system's inputs and outputs, comparing the actual results with the expected results based on requirements. This method is especially useful for functional testing when testing user interface manual testing features and business flows. 

For example: When testing the login function, testers will enter valid and invalid login information, then check if the system responds correctly (e.g., successful login with valid information, displaying an error message with invalid information). Another example is testing the product search function on an e-commerce website by entering different keywords and checking if the search results are accurate.

White Box Testing: 

White box testing focuses on the internal code structure, logic, and execution flow of the software. Testers need code knowledge to design test scenarios, ensuring all code paths, branches, and conditions are tested. This method helps detect potential bugs in the code that black box testing might miss. 

For example: Testing a calculation function by considering different input cases, including boundary values and special values, to ensure all code branches are executed correctly and the function returns the correct results in all cases. Another example is testing a code section that handles exceptions to ensure the program runs stably when encountering error situations.

Grey-box Testing: 

Grey-box testing is a combination of black box and white box testing. Testers have partial knowledge of the system's internal structure, usually about data, architecture, or algorithms. This knowledge helps design more effective test cases, focusing on high-risk areas and optimizing test coverage. 

For example:Testing a web application by considering the database structure to design data testing queries, ensuring data is stored and retrieved correctly. Another example is testing an API by understanding the input parameters and return data format to design appropriate test cases

Functional Testing: 

Functional testing focuses on verifying that each function of the software works correctly according to the defined requirements. It focuses on "what" the software does, not "how" it does it. Test cases are designed based on requirement specifications and business documents. 

For example: Testing the "Add to Cart" function on an e-commerce website. Testers will test cases such as adding one product, adding multiple products, adding out-of-stock products, etc., to ensure the function works correctly in all situations.

Regression Testing: 

Regression testing is performed after any code changes, whether it is a bug fix or a new feature. The goal is to ensure these changes do not affect previously working functions. Automating regression testing helps save time and ensure consistency. 

For example: After fixing a bug related to the payment function, regression testing will be performed to ensure other functions such as login, product search, and product details view still work normally.

Usability Testing: 

Usability testing evaluates user-friendliness and ensures smooth end-user validation testing. It evaluates the ease of use and user experience of the software. Testers observe real users interacting with the software to find issues with the interface, navigation, intuitiveness, and overall experience. 

For example: Organizing a testing session with real users to have them perform a specific task on the application, such as placing an order for a product. Testers will observe user behavior, record any difficulties they encounter, and collect their feedback on the user experience.

Specialized Types of Manual Testing Techniques

Exploratory Testing:

Among the types of manual testing, exploratory testing is a software testing approach that focuses on learning, exploring, and understanding the application during the testing process. Instead of following pre-written test scripts, testers freely interact with the application, using their experience and knowledge to find potential bugs.

This method is especially effective in Agile projects and projects that require rapid feedback, as it allows testers to flexibly adapt to changes and quickly detect issues. Exploratory testing is often used when requirements are unclear or when it is necessary to test aspects related to user experience.

Example: A tester is asked to test a new feature of a social networking application. Instead of following a specific test script, they will freely explore this feature, trying different actions such as posting, commenting, sharing, friending, etc., to find bugs or issues related to user experience.

Cross-Browser Manual Testing:

Cross-browser manual testing is the process of testing a web application on different browsers (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge) to ensure the application displays and functions consistently across all browsers.

Because each browser has different ways of displaying and processing code, testing on multiple browsers is very important to ensure a good user experience on all platforms. Common issues include CSS display errors, JavaScript errors, and other compatibility issues.

Example: Checking the interface of a website on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari to ensure the layout, images, and text are displayed correctly on all browsers. Checking interactive functions such as buttons and input forms to ensure they work correctly on every browser.

User Interface (UI) Manual Testing:

User interface manual testing focuses on evaluating the user interface of an application, ensuring aesthetics, intuitiveness, consistency, and ease of use.

The goal is to ensure users have a good experience when interacting with the application. The aspects tested include layout, colors, fonts, images, icons, responsiveness, and accessibility.

Example: Checking if the buttons are aligned correctly, checking if the colors and fonts are harmonious and easy to read, checking if the interface is responsive on mobile devices. Checking accessibility for people with disabilities (e.g., checking color contrast, screen reader support).

Practical Applications of Manual Testing in Agile Projects

Manual testing plays a vital role in agile environments by supporting quick iterations and collaboration among teams.

Exploratory Testing in Agile

Manual testing fits perfectly within agile development by providing rapid feedback and fostering collaboration. During sprints, QA teams use exploratory testing to validate new features like dashboards or forms, addressing issues promptly. This process ensures swift iterations and high-quality outputs.

Usability Testing for End-User Feedback

Usability testing focuses on evaluating the ease of use, intuitiveness, and overall user experience of the software. The goal is to ensure users can easily and effectively achieve their goals when using the application.

In Agile, gathering feedback from end-users is crucial to ensure the product meets their needs. Usability testing allows the development team to quickly collect this feedback by observing real users interacting with the software. Commonly used methods include user testing, surveys, interviews, and user data analysis.

Regression Testing During Sprints

In Agile environments with rapid sprints, ensuring existing functionalities remain unaffected by new changes is crucial. Manual regression testing plays a key role in this. During each sprint, as new features are developed, testers quickly perform regression testing on core functionalities. This helps detect early any errors arising from changes, allowing the development team to fix them immediately. 

Manual regression testing within sprints also fosters close collaboration between testers and developers. They analyze test results together, identify the root cause of errors, and propose solutions, ensuring software quality is maintained throughout the development process.

Black-Box Testing for Feature Validation

In Agile, software development is divided into short sprints, each focusing on building and testing specific features. Black-box testing plays a crucial role in validating these features. By focusing on the input and output of a feature without needing knowledge of the internal code structure, testers can quickly check if the feature functions as required. This is especially useful in Agile as it allows the testing team to provide rapid feedback to the development team, helping them fix bugs promptly and ensure sprint progress. 

Black-box testing also promotes collaboration between testers and stakeholders (such as customers or users) by allowing them to easily participate in the testing process and provide feedback based on real-world usage experience.

Manual vs Automated Testing: Types and Examples

Comparing Manual Testing and Automated Testing

Pros of Manual Testing

• Suitable for Exploratory Testing and Usability Testing: Manual testing allows testers to interact directly with the application, evaluate user experience intuitively, and discover unforeseen bugs that automated testing might miss.
• Flexible and quick to adapt to changes: When requirements change, manual tests can be adjusted quickly without needing to rewrite test scripts.
• Lower initial costs: No need to invest in automation tools and software.

Cons of Manual Testing

• Time-consuming and labor-intensive: Especially for repetitive tasks.
• Difficult to ensure consistency: Test results can be affected by human factors.
• Difficult to test performance and load: Ineffective for testing application performance under heavy user load.

Automated Testing:

Pros of Automated Testing:

• Saves time and effort for repetitive tasks: Automating test cases saves time and reduces human error.
• Ensures consistency: Test cases are executed consistently every time they run.
• Suitable for Regression Testing and Performance Testing: Very effective for testing previously tested features and testing the application's load capacity.

Cons of Automated Testing:

• Requires programming skills: Requires personnel with the ability to write test scripts.
• Difficult to adapt to UI changes: When the UI changes, test scripts need to be updated.
• Higher initial investment costs: Requires investment in automation tools and software.

Use Cases for Each Method

Manual Testing:

• Testing new features: When a new feature is developed, manual testing is the best option to evaluate user experience and ensure the feature works intuitively and is easy to use. For example: Testing the new account registration flow, testing the user interface of a newly added feature.
• Usability Testing: Evaluating the user-friendliness and ease of use of the application. For example: Checking if users can easily find the necessary information on the website, checking the intuitiveness of the navigation system.
• Exploratory Testing: Testers freely explore the application to find potential bugs without specific test scripts. For example:  When testing a task management application, a tester might try creating a task with a very long title, attaching many large files, assigning the task to multiple people simultaneously, or changing the task status repeatedly to see how the application responds. 
• Testing small bugs or UI issues: Checking for typos, display errors, or other minor issues related to the user interface. For example: Checking if the buttons are aligned correctly, checking if the text overflows the frame.

Automated Testing:

• Regression Testing: Ensuring that new code changes do not affect previously working features. For example: After each code update, automatically running test cases to check if the old features are still working properly.
• Performance Testing: Evaluating the application's performance under different load conditions. For example: Testing page load speed when many users access the site simultaneously, checking the server's load capacity.
• Large Data Testing: Testing the application with large amounts of data to ensure stability and performance. For example: Checking if the application can handle one million data records.
• Cross-browser and Cross-device Testing: Automatically testing the user interface on multiple browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari,...) and devices (desktop, mobile, tablet) to ensure compatibility.

Combining Both for Best Results

In practice, no single testing method is perfect for every situation. Combining manual and automated testing (also known as hybrid testing) often yields the best results. By leveraging the strengths of both methods, we can achieve broader test coverage, save time, and optimize costs.

For example:

• Manually testing new features: When a new feature is developed, manual testing helps evaluate user experience and detect potential bugs intuitively.
• Automating regression testing: After a feature has been manually tested and stabilized, test cases can be automated for quick and efficient regression testing after each code update.

This combination allows us to:

• Optimize resources: Focus resources on testing activities that are suitable for each method.
• Improve testing efficiency: Ensure broader test coverage and detect more types of bugs.
• Save time and costs: Automating repetitive tasks saves time and minimizes human error.

Common Challenges and Solutions in Manual Testing

Managing Test Scenarios and Test Cases

Effectively managing test scenarios and test cases is crucial, but it also presents several challenges. Firstly, a large number of test cases makes organization and tracking difficult. Secondly, constantly changing requirements necessitate timely test case updates. Finally, unclear test case descriptions easily lead to misunderstandings and skipped test steps.

Solutions:

To address these issues, using specialized test case management tools for organization, tracking, and version control is essential. At the same time, establishing a clear change management process and detailed test case writing rules is crucial to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of test cases.

Ensuring Test Environment Setup

Setting up a test environment faces several challenges. Firstly, accurately replicating the production environment in terms of hardware, software, and data is difficult. Secondly, managing and maintaining multiple test environments for different purposes requires significant resources. Finally, ensuring the stability and availability of the test environment, especially in large projects, is also a challenge.

Solutions:

To overcome these challenges, using virtualization and environment management tools to create and manage test environments effectively is necessary. Concurrently, establishing a clear environment management process, including provisioning, configuration, and maintenance, is crucial to ensure consistency and stability.

Effective Bug Reporting Practices

Ineffective bug reporting often encounters issues such as unclear bug descriptions, lack of environment information, or failure to determine severity and priority. This makes it difficult for developers to understand and fix bugs, prolonging processing time and affecting project progress.

Solution:

To report bugs effectively, it is necessary to provide detailed descriptions of the steps to reproduce the bug, expected and actual results, along with complete information about the testing environment. Determining the bug's severity and priority, along with using illustrative images or videos, helps developers quickly identify and address critical issues.

Maintaining Test Consistency Over Time

Maintaining test consistency is challenging due to constantly changing software requirements, leading to untimely or incomplete test case updates. This can cause testing to overlook critical bugs.

Solution:

To maintain test consistency, it's necessary to ensure test cases always accurately reflect current requirements and are executed according to a unified process. Using test case management tools, combined with a clear testing process and periodic test case reviews, will help achieve this goal

How to Master Manual Testing Techniques

1. Continuous Learning: Stay updated on manual testing techniques for QA engineers.
2. Skill Enhancement: Practice various manual testing types in agile projects..
3. Networking: Join QA communities to exchange knowledge and insights.
4. Hands-On Training: Enroll in step-by-step guide to exploratory manual testing courses to enhance expertise.

 Manual testing, especially the types of manual testing discussed, remains essential for ensuring software quality, particularly in detecting user experience issues that automated testing struggles to address. In the future, with the rise of AI and machine learning, types of manual testing will continue to complement automated testing to tackle emerging challenges in software quality assurance.