While automated tests are a great tool for receiving feedback on development work quickly and often, there are still things that will be tested manually. While automating repetitive tests is the best way to continuously monitor quality, some things will require the human eye.

Manual testing is the tipping point for shifting left. Whenever any type of test or validation is shifted left, this means that it is executed before manual tests are performed. The benefit of this is that all of these automated activities add to the amount of confidence that we might have in the version of the application that is being tested, increasing the chances that the version will also pass manual testing. In other words, when manual testing starts, it should be very unlikely that any new issues will be uncovered.

There are two types of manual tests:

• Scripted tests
• Exploratory tests

Both types of tests will be discussed in the following sections.