Conclusion

The advantages to a semiautomated approach to manual testing are numerous, but the two most important ones are repeatability of the tests and documentation of the test conditions, procedure, and results. The test results logs can be used to generate error reports, which in turn can be the source of test metrics. The reports can be used to monitor and guide further manual testing efforts. All of this is not possible when manual test is purely ad hoc (ad hoc being used in the true sense of its meaning, that each manual test execution is uniquely geared to the moment).

The test script that we used to implement the semiautomated manual testing approach in this chapter are also included on the FTP site that supports this book.