Manual testing

Manual testing, as you may have guessed, means starting your application and actually using it.

Since your software is your creative work, naturally, you are interested to find out how it performs. You should certainly take the time to do this but think of it as downtime and a chance to relax, rather than a formal part of your development process.

The downside to using your software as opposed to developing your software is that using it takes up a lot of time. It sounds silly but pointing, clicking, and typing all take up valuable time. Plus, it takes time to get test environments set up and primed with the relevant test data.

For this reason, it’s important to avoid manual testing where possible. There are, however, times when it’s necessary, as we’ll discover in this section.

There is always a temptation to manually test the software after each feature is complete, just to verify that it works. If you find yourself doing this a lot...