Testing ASP.NET Web Applications

7.1. Why Is Manual Testing Important?

Although we have already discussed at length the advantages of automated testing, there is still a time and place where manual testing is important, in some cases more important than automated testing. Many people have successfully released software and products without having any automated testing in place, instead relying on the manual testing techniques discussed throughout this chapter. Even though this has been successful for many companies, we feel that the best approach to take is a mixture of automated testing, as we have already discussed, and manual testing. Combining the two provides you with a safety net to catch regression bugs, allowing you to push forward with the development and still catch the issues which only manual testing can uncover.

The aim is to decide how you are going to use each technique to solve different problems. As we discussed in the previous chapters, automated testing is extremely powerful and cost effective at allowing you to ensure that the system meets customer requirements now and in the future, and ensuring that as the system develops and grows, all the requirements and features are still working as you expect. When you add in TDD, the code quality is also increased which will have long-term benefits when it comes to the maintainability of the code base. This is where automated testing is best. However, at the moment automated testing is not very good when it comes to knowing if the application is usable ...