What If You Have Manual Tests?

Are you really going to have no manual tests? What about testing for a consistent look and feel in the user interface? What if you've automated 80% of your testing by testing behind the front end and you just don't feel it's worth the effort to automate the remaining 20% of user-interface testing, because you don't expect those tests will find many defects anyway? What if your application is incredibly complex and can mean the difference between life and death, so you want subject-matter experts to intelligently explore the system and make sure it has no defects the automated tests weren't designed to catch? If you've mastered automating all your acceptance tests, you're qualified to decide if some excellent reason dictates performing a test manually. Maybe your hangar is small and you need the wings to come off your airplane for storage.

What do you do with tests you don't automate? Is a manual test intrinsically bad or useless? We don't think so, if your team has mastered test automation. There are right and wrong ways to automate tests, and there are right and wrong ways to execute manual tests. Tests that aren't repeatable or that don't produce timely, easy-to-read results are bad. If you have manual tests, use a test framework that lets you record the results as you go, and have a tool that translates these recorded results into visual, graphic reports, just as the automated tests do.