Manual vs. Automated

Manual testing

Manual testing methods require the examiner to regulate and control variables such as background illumination and stimulus selection and presentation. Manual methods are less expensive and can provide basic visual field information in a relatively fast and efficient manner. It is difficult to standardize and reproduce results with manual methods.

The most signification of traditional test automation is the decreased test execution time and cost, and increase test coverage for each testing cycle.

Automation

In software engineering, software testing automated testing is that which is performed, to a greater or lesser extent, by a computer

The most straightforward aspect of testing to automate is the execution of test cases. For programs which do not normally interact directly with users (and instead "respond" to the contents of a disk file or instructions passed over a network, or take input as text from a keyboard), it is relatively simple to write small programs (usually called test scripts) to provide the appropriate input. It is somewhat more complex for programs with a graphical user interface (GUI) to do similarly, but specialized scripting tools for controlling GUI programs exist and are commonly used for performing testing on this class of applications.

Manual vs. Automated

Automated Testing is a good solution for Functional Testing (Regression Testing to be more specific) if the test cases are repeatable in nature. Experts say that Automated Testing is an enhancement of Manual Testing. Remember Automated Testing involves a complete cycle of Software Development. It does not bring immediate schedule or effort reduction. Only if you would have used the right process and techniques, you can rely on Automated Testing. It involves a lot of effort to get familiar with tools, scripting language, develop the scripts and then maintain them in the future.

Now it is upon you to decide why you should use automated testing, if you have enough time and your software is going through incremental builds and patches, and this has to continue over a long period, and then may be you can give a thought over automating your test cases. Last point, Manual testing will still is needed even if you go for automated testing.