[DZone Research] Automated Testing vs. Manual Testing

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Automated Testing: Your End-to-End Ecosystem. 

Introduction

For this year's Automated Testing Guide Survey, we received 821 responses with a 64% completion rate. Based on these responses, we've compiled a quick article on the uses of automated and manual testing. 

Automated Testing

Only 11% of respondents told us that their organization does not practice any kind of automated testing. Out of the 89% who do automate tests somewhere within their organization and SDLC, there were varying opinions as to when it's best to automate tests, and which tests should be automated. When asked at what stage they begin automating their tests, 54% of respondents told us development, 31% in staging/QA/testing, and 4% in deployment.  

The most popular tests to automate in the development pipeline were integration tests (77%), component tests (52%), and performance tests (51%). Comparing this data to last year's automated testing survey, we see that integration tests are on the rise, while the frequency of component and performance testing is falling. In last year's survey, 61% of respondents automated their integration tests, which, when compared with this year's data, constitutes a 16% increase. Automated performance tests, however, suffered a 5% decrease year-over-year, and automated component tests saw a 6% year-over-over decrease. 

Manual Testing

Since manual testing still has its place in the development pipeline, and there's a small, but not insignificant, faction of organizations who do not use automated testing, let's quickly look at where and how manual tests are used and how this compares to automated tests. When asked at what stage they begin manual testing, 51% reported development, 40% said staging/QA/testing, and 7% told us deployment. Not too surprisingly, manual tests are used in much the same places in the pipeline as automated tests. When it comes the types of tests, however, we see some divergence between manual and automated. When asked, "Which tests in your organization’s pipeline(s) are currently performed manually?", 60% said user acceptance tests, 50% usability tests, 41% story-level tests, and 38% integration tests.  

Interestingly, despite the year-over-year decrease in automated component and performance tests noted above, the instances of manual components, performance, and integration tests all decreased as well. In 2017, 41% of respondents performed manual integration tests, while in 2018 this number fell to 38%; manual performance tests decreased from 45% in 2017 to 34% in 2018; and manual component tests fell from 40% in 2017 to 29% in 2018.  

Conclusion 

Despite the numbers presented here, whether your team goes with automated or manual testing truly depends on the situation. A large portion of this year's respondents to the Automated Testing survey work in enterprise-level environments, and, in such development and testing environments, automated testing is a great resource that can decrease the amount of repetitive and monotonous work. While automated testing has become the more popular testing method, automating everything in your SDLC is impossible and some tests are better off done manually ("From 0 to 100: How to Get Into Automated Testing as a Manual Tester," by Alex McPeak). When it comes to ad-hoc, usability, and exploratory tests, manual tests may be the way to go ("What's the Difference Between Automated Testing and Manual Testing?" by Whitney Donaldson).

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Automated Testing: Your End-to-End Ecosystem.