Testing Techniques for Better and Efficient Manual Testing

Manual testing is the most popular method to validate and approve the functionality of an application or a software. Manual testing is simple, easy to implement and straightforward. As we all know that technology has been more advanced and functionalities are going to be more complex which is challenging to validate that each and everything is working fine as a client want to. But, the area and the working of Manual Testing is almost unchanged nothing has been changed. 

We all know that Automation Testing is in trend and that is more reliable and consumes less time to test anything but can't test all the application just by a single click. We can’t replace human scent with the automation. But the combination of the Manual and Automation is the best. Manual testing is the thing which is almost unchanged by a long time and sometimes it proves that Manual testing is a better choice than Automation testing. 

Few testing techniques can be implemented as a part of manual testing so we can update our test cases in a much better way. It is not such a hard and fast rule but it is the best way which suits the scenario.
Those testing techniques are as follows -

* Equivalence Partitioning - This technique tries to define the test cases that uncover the classes of defects, thereby reduces the number of test cases that must be developed. The main advantage of this testing is, perform efficient testing by using test number of test cases in less time. 

(a.) Inputs for the application are divided into groups that are expected to represent the similar behavior. 
(b.) The main goal of behind this to complete the test coverage and less test case redundancy.

* Boundary Value Analysis - In Boundary value analysis, we test the boundaries between equivalence partitions. 

(a.) Boundary value analysis is applied to see that is there any fault at the boundary of the input domain. So, in this method, we don’t have any need to test for these errors in the mid. With this testing technique, the boundary values are tested by the starting of writing the test cases for a particular input field.

(b.) This technique is very easy, fast and brilliant way to find any error in inputs that might occur to disturb the functionality of the application or a program.

Example - Let, we have a program and there is the range of integers is between 20 to 100. There are 3 sets of test cases, which are negative range from -100 to +100, zero (0) and Positive range from 1 to 100. 

Test cases which are acceptable for Boundary Value Analysis is - 

*Test cases with the same data as input boundaries : -100 and +100 in our case.

*Test data having values just below the edge of input : -101 and 99.

*Test data having values just above the edge of input : -99 and 101.

* Ad-Hoc Testing - The main goal of performing this testing is break the system. A tester performs unplanned tasks during this testing (not a monkey testing). It does not require any special type of test cases. This testing can be performed only one stage when the tester is highly aware to the working of the application. 

(a.) This is the testing which is done on the basis of skills, scent and the experience. We can’t write strong test cases for this type of testing. The best example of this testing is Exploratory testing. In which a user performs the tasks to understand the functionality of the application and executes the functionality randomly and suddenly modifies the inputs.

(b.) Because the new user does not know much about the features of the application. We design tests to help us and learn more about it to reduce the risk of failure.

(c.) Ad-Hoc testing does not follow a particular way of testing. Main aim of this testing is to find the defects by performing the random testing on the provided functionalities.

(d.) Main aspect of this testing the imagination of the test engineer, how deeply he is thinking and performing the testing. Guessing about the possible errors and raise them is called "Error Guessing" by which Ad-Hoc testing can be achieved. 

Hope this will help you to do better testing on your application.

Happy testing :)