Is this book for manual or automated testing? Both!

This book has many proposals for what you should test. It does not cover how those tests should be run. The aim, after applying this book to your feature, is to produce a comprehensive test plan with steps to detect many defect types.

How you run that test plan is up to you. Some areas must be done manually – exploratory testing, for instance, involves a tester getting their hands on a feature to investigate how it behaves in an unstructured way. Only once you have learned how it works can you write the feature specification and do systematic testing, either manual or automated. User experience testing is also best started with a genuine user present. Conversely, load testing requires automation to reach the required load levels and cannot be done by hand.

In between much of the functional testing, security, error cases, and even some user experience testing can be automated. Where possible, that is a vital stage in the testing process to free up testers’ time for future test designs. That is especially true when following a Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, in which changes are pushed to live systems within minutes. There, you must automate tests and carefully choose which to run on each change.

This book does not discuss how to perform manual testing, automate tests, or what tools you should use. Those are subjects for other books in the Packt catalog. Here, we will describe what tests you should run and how you should design your test plan.