Introduction

If you’re wondering how the manual testing process works and looking for manual software testing basics, you’re at the right place.

In this blog post, we’ll guide you through the basics of manual testing including its definition, stages, and methods.

Once you develop basic understanding of manual testing, we will talk about 4 stages of manual testing. Then we will discuss major testing techniques for executing manual testing.

Let’s begin by the definition of manual testing.

Stages of Manual Testing

Manual testing has several stages a software product passes through. Here, we’re going to discuss 4 stages of manual software testing.

Unit Testing

As the name suggests, this stage of manual software testing tests all the individual units of your software product. Here, we use white box testing method to execute unit testing. Before your software product is passed onto the QA department, it’s mandatory to perform a unit test.

You can have many benefits if you perform unit testing. While you take a modular approach to write code for your software product, your code becomes reusable. Also, it makes your debugging process quite easier.

Integration Testing

Once you’ve successfully completed the unit testing, the next stage is to perform integration testing. You can execute integration testing when the units and components of your software product are integrated together.

Integration testing helps to verify the reliability, functionality, and stability of your software modules.

The integration testing targets the functional areas that are associated with integration, directly or indirectly. It may include such features that involve different modules to work with. For instance, if any feature of the software product inputs information from one module and generates output for that information in another module.

System Testing

Once you’re done with the integration testing process, here comes system testing. This particular stage of software testing is carried out only when your software product is fully integrated.

System testing helps to check the system behavior and to check if it complies with the software requirements specification (SRS).

Software system testing is a complex and tricky job to do due to lack of availability of time to perform it. It’s necessary to have a system that complies with the user requirements. And for that, you need to develop a test environment that is identical to the production environment. Also, you have to generate real world data for this purpose.

User Acceptance Testing

Acceptance Testing is also known as the User Acceptance Testing, which is performed by the users. That’s how it has been named User Acceptance Testing.

This sort of software testing is performed before we accept or finalize our software product.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) entails real-world scenarios experienced by the users with varying roles and privileges in the system.

As this is quite a complicated process, it’s suggested to make a test plan like a test guide before you begin to execute UAT.

Methods of Manual Software Testing

As you have learned about different stages of manual software testing, let’s dig deeper into manual testing in terms of the methods it’s commonly performed.

Black Box Testing

Black box methodology is a manual software testing methodology in which manual QA tester tests the functional and non-functional behaviour of the software product.

In this methodology, a manual quality assurance tester interacts with the application without having the knowledge of structure or code of the software product.

The QA manual tester has several testing techniques in hand while opting to go for black box testing. All of these techniques help differently to find defects and bugs in your application.

White Box Testing

In white box testing, manual testers are aware of the structure and code of the application. This is also referred to as transparent box testing or glass box testing.

Developers use white box testing techniques to perform unit testing. It includes data flow testing, control flow testing, statement coverage, path testing, branch testing, and decision coverage.

Grey Box Testing

As you have learned about the black box testing and white box testing, getting to know about grey box testing is not hard. The reason is that grey box testing is the blend of black box testing and white box testing.

The purpose of any testing technique or method is to effectively target the bugs and defects in the software. In this particular method, the bugs are identified based on the improper usage or structure of the application.

Grey box testing is extremely helpful in finding and fixing the most critical issues in the software product.