Manual tests vs automated tests

I started working in Mondora in August and my job was to test web applications and find hidden bugs or errors in these applications. It was the first time for me, I had never tested an application before, so I started to learn what I had to test and how I had to test it.

Testing is usually not so difficult, but it requires a lot of time to test the application on each browser and on different operating systems. You have to do the same operation on every browser and you have to be very careful, as different browsers may have different reactions to your application. After almost a month, I started to learn how to use automated tests. The first times I didn’t write any code, I started using the Selenium plugin for Firefox, just to see how automated tests worked. Obviously my tests were very simple and I still had to use manual tests too, but it was the first step towards automated tests. After a while I decided to use the Selenium WebDriver, so I had to learn how to write the code for my tests. This step wasn’t immediate and I had to alternate manual tests and automated tests to make sure that they were doing the correct thing. But when I was sure that I had written a correct test I could stop doing it manually and I could replace it with an automated test. Automated tests are very useful, especially when your application does a lot of different things and you have to test every function. You can save a lot of time by doing a different automated test for each function, because when you need to test something you just run the test on the browser that you want to try and check that it has ended successfully. The only operation you have to do is to change the browser in your code before running it. Obviously there are still things that are difficult to test automatically, for example because they change every time you run the application. However, even if some operations need to be done manually you save a very large amount of time. One of the most important aspects is that when you are sure that the test you wrote is correct, because you tried it several times and it worked, if there’s an error you can be pretty sure that the problem is in the application and not in your test. When you are testing manually there is always the doubt that you have done something wrong. I’ve learned a lot doing automated tests and now my work is faster but at the same time more efficient than before.