An individual can execute all the tests mentioned above, but it will be very expensive and counter-productive to do so. As humans, we have limited capacity to perform a large number of actions in a repeatable and reliable way. But a machine can easily do that rapidly and will test that login/password combination works for the 100th time without complaining.
To automate your tests, you will first need to write them programmatically using a testing framework that suits your application. PHPUnit, Mocha, RSpec are examples of testing frameworks that you can use for PHP, Javascript, and Ruby respectively. There are many options out there for each language so you might have to do some research and ask developer communities to find out what would be the best framework for you.
When your tests can be executed via script from your terminal, you can have them be automatically executed by a continuous integration server like Bamboo or use a cloud service like Bitbucket Pipelines. These tools will monitor your repositories and execute your test suite whenever new changes are pushed to the main repository.
Exploratory Testing
The more features and improvements go into your code, the more you’ll need to test to make sure that all your system works properly. And then for each bug you fix, it would be wise to check that they don’t get back in newer releases. Automation is key to make this possible and writing tests sooner or later will become part of your development workflow.
So the question is whether it is still worth doing manual testing? The short answer is yes, and it should be focused on what is called exploratory testing where the goal is to uncover non-obvious errors.
An exploratory testing session should not exceed two hours and need to have a clear scope to help testers focus on a specific area of the software. Once all testers have been briefed, is up to them to try various actions to check how the system behaves. This type of testing is expensive by nature but is quite helpful to uncover UI issues or verify complex user workflows. It’s something especially worth doing whenever a significant new capability is added to your application to help understand how it behaves under edge cases.
A note about testing
To finish this guide, it’s important to talk about the goal of testing. While it’s important to test that users can use your application (I can log in, I can save an object) it is equally important to test that your system doesn’t break when bad data or unexpected actions are performed. You need to anticipate what would happen when a user makes a typo, tries to save an incomplete form or uses the wrong API. You need to check if someone can easily compromise data, get access to a resource they’re not supposed to. A good testing suite should try to break your app and help understand its limit.
And finally, tests are code too! So don’t forget them during code review as they might be the final gate to production.
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