Topic: Role of Software Testing in Agile: Manual Testing v/s Automated Testing

Initiator: Aakanksha Seetha
Discussion: On various manual testing practices in and before the sprint, automated tools, where does manual testing comes in a sprint flow
Quotes: Manual testing is exploratory testing and reveals the bugs/issues that functional testing may not and automated testing can never. Automated testing saves a lot of time of testers by relieving them from doing repetitive testing.
Revelations: Agile promotes continues integrations which creates pressure on team to move towards automation but nothing can replace manual testing.
Highlights: QA contributes towards the story creation process to refine and write user acceptance criteria and QA tests. Story discussed in grooming session should have QA feedback. When a story is in sprint Dev should write unit tests for the test cases defined in story as much as possible and QA performs rest of the manual/exploratory testing and regression and functional testing (if not automated)
Recommendations: Exploratory and session testing is key to manual testing. Scripting is key to automated testing. Using tools such as Specflow helps manual tester to transition from manual testing to automated without going deeper at programming levels.