

Ask HN: How do you manage manual testing? - nagoff

We're just getting down and dirty with a final round of testing before our initial private beta release. Part of this includes manually testing the system, mostly in the form of scenario tests for our most important use cases.<p>How do you manage this process? 
e.g. create a test script (txt/html/xls?) and run through it with several different OS/Browser etc. and then record the results
======
cschneid
Getting manual testing right is hard. I used to do it as my main job (testing
a large java app).

We had plain text test plans, which worked well enough. We didn't do as good
of a job of keeping track of finished plans as we should have.

You need to very tightly specify what you are testing for. Manual testing is
incredibly valuable to test the things that programs can't pick up, and also
very wasteful if you are testing the simple stuff like that.

Also, look for what's scriptable around the manual test point. For instance,
if you are verifying the 4 different kinds of order views, have a script which
generates those orders on staging, and fires up a browser window w/ 4 tabs to
those orders (already logged in, etc). Manual testing doesn't have to mean
manual setup & tear down.

An xls or google spreadsheet is the best bet for tracking, at least for a one-
off smaller scale testing environment. At my job, we did eventually get around
to writing a "Manual Test Manager" rails app to help us track it, but I left
before it got much traction.

The other suggestion here of selenium is useful, but perhaps not what you're
looking for. It's very useful to record whole click-throughs of your app, but
you still need to verify stuff like CSS & layout, wording of text, that labels
match up with the right fields, etc. Selenium just doesn't do all that very
well (too much fuzzy human intelligence).

If you plan on making this repeatable, divide the test cases into "smoke
tests" and "full tests". (Smoke Test == "is it spewing smoke" ie. is anything
obviously broken). That gives you the ability to run through a 20 minute
manual test suite right before the weekly deploy, and do a full manual test of
edited areas, etc.

Also, don't slack on your automated tests. Computers are just awesome at unit
tests.

------
blinks
I've heard good things about Selenium: <http://seleniumhq.org/>

