Every year, a considerable number appear worldwide, but only 5% become profitable, and only 1% are genuinely successful, as was the case with Instagram or Uber. For your project to succeed, you need to pay more attention to quality assurance issues to ensure that your product can perform the functions for which it was created. Often, startups face a choice – automatic or manual testing. Today we want to understand this issue in more detail and give valuable tips.
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What are manual and automated testing?
Testing is a complex process primarily to understand whether your product can work correctly.
Manual testing provided by testing company TestFort assumes that a person does the check with the help of his hands, eyes, and deep knowledge. This is a slower error detection process compared to automated searches. At the same time, automatic tests involve using specific tools that make the most in-depth analysis of the code per the specified test scenarios.
Each type of testing has its advantages and disadvantages and is used at different stages of software development. Ideally, it would be best if the startup used both types of testing to achieve the highest quality result. Still, the problem is that such an integrated approach can go beyond the budget of a startup. But the result of this approach will definitely be the best investment in the future of any developing business.
How is testing done in startups?
Software development is always a complex process that involves several stages. Practice shows that it makes no sense to start automated tests before you have at least some stable functionality that will stay the same.
Usually, manual testing is used in the early stages, which developers often perform to ensure no punctuation and other errors in their code and, most importantly, whether the software can perform the necessary functions.
Moving from manual testing to automation usually starts when the code is already wholly ready, and there is a need to perform the most in-depth analysis to identify vulnerabilities and performance and evaluate how the program will work under stressful conditions. Your company must be 100% sure that the software is ready before using automated tests, as it will not be effective.
You can only accept manual tests if you plan to automate testing. The fact is that testing should begin in parallel with development with software development because the sooner you identify errors in the program code, the less harm they can cause. Even a minor bug at the beginning can have an extremely negative impact on the final result. For example, Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon, made a ridiculous mistake that allowed users to order a negative amount of goods on the site, so money was not debited from customer accounts but instead credited. To prevent such a problem, paying more attention to testing was necessary.
Do startups need automated testing?
If manual testing plays a massive role in startup development, you may stop automated testing altogether.
No, test automation has a considerable number of advantages, among which are:
- Deeper code analysis. It allows you to study the code in more detail, determine how it works in stressful situations, what vulnerabilities exist, how it works on different devices, and much more.
- High speed. Although setting up automated tests takes a lot of time, the testing process takes much less time because you can run several tests in parallel 24/7 at once.
- Economic efficiency. To conduct manual testing, you need to involve several manual testing specialists who have worked for a long time. The longer the code development takes, the more money you need to allocate.
Thus, you can only do automated tests if you want to create high-quality software that will work consistently.
If you have a small project that you plan on doing without scaling up in the future, you can get by with just manual tests. However, if you want to add new features to keep your product competitive, you should run automated tests on time.
Do startups need manual tests?
Today there is much talk about manual tests gradually losing relevance, and soon there will be no need for them. Such talk is fueled by the fact that automated tests have taken giant steps forward over the past few years. Even today, they can solve a considerable number of problems.
However, it is not possible to opt out of manual tests at the moment. The fact is that today there is no good tool that could qualitatively assess the quality of the interface and user experience. You must include a manual testing strategy for your product if you want it to be pleasant, convenient and profitable.
