Manual Testing vs Automation Testing: What Should Beginners Learn First ?

Manual Testing vs Automation Testing — oh what a glamorous fight they make, especially when the prod database is deleting users and your test suite is greener than envy.

The production database was deleting random users.

My ‘100% passed’ automation report?
Green as a damn cucumber. The production database was deleting random users. My ‘100% passed’ automation report? Green as a damn cucumber. If this doesn’t scream ‘Manual Testing vs Automation Testing’ in the real world, I don’t know what does.

So green it could moonlight as a vegan smoothie.

Meanwhile, a junior tester—bless her unburnt soul—found the bug clicking around like a caffeinated monkey on UAT.
She asked a question.
Not a script.
Not a CI/CD pipeline.
Just a browser, a brain, and a nose for BS.

And that, dear beginner, is why you start with manual testing.
Before you go writing “self-healing AI cucumber gherkin god-tier test scripts” that couldn’t catch a cold.

🧨 Let’s start with a War Story

Pre-Maven. Pre-Jenkins. Pre-will to live.
We had a new feature: deactivate users.
Business logic: you can’t deactivate admins.

Automation said: ✅
All green.
All good.
Except…

Manual testing found that the “Deactivate” button was just hidden with CSS.

DOM manipulation, baby.
An admin could open dev tools and deactivate themselves.

Imagine that—your system admin rage-quitting themselves out of existence.
Production almost did.

Guess what saved the release?

Me. Clicking. Slowly. On. A. Staging. Server.

👩‍🔬 Tool Debate (that will definitely get me hate-mail)

Playwright vs Selenium?
Please.
That’s like arguing if you want to be stabbed with a butterknife or a rusty fork.

You think Playwright is sleek?
I’ve seen Selenium scripts outlive company founders. And no, your flaky Cypress test isn’t ‘self-healing.’ It’s just sleeping. If you want to know how modern automation got here, read the Selenium Project’s glorious history.

Cypress fans when I show them a 10-year-old Selenium test that still works:

😨 “But…but it runs outside the browser sandbox?”
Yes, Timmy. It actually tests the damn app. Not just fakes user interactions on an SPA that’s 95% loading spinner and 5% regret.

😑 “But Automation is the Future!”

Listen, automation is important.
It’s powerful.
It’s also a lying, flaky, drama queen of a co-worker.

Reasons to manual test:

It’s fun
You learn stuff
Uh…
~~brain freeze~~
It doesn’t gaslight you with false positives.

Automation without understanding what to test is like buying gym equipment when you don’t even walk.
Congrats on your fancy test suite that doesn’t cover business logic.

🧠 “QA Career Path” and Other Buzzwords That Gave Me Migraines

They told me:

“Learn automation first! It’s hot in the market!”

And now I’m babysitting a framework with 2,000 tests.
500 fail every run.
The devs ignore it.
Management thinks it’s “AI-powered.”
I sob in flaky tests.

You definately ~~definately~~ need to know the app.
The flows.
The weird bugs that only happen on Thursdays.
The kind of insight no script catches because it wasn’t in the test data.

Manual testing teaches you to think like a user.
Automation teaches you to think like a dev who wants to replace users with scripts.

🦴 Nostalgia Pain (a.k.a. why I drink)

You kids don’t know pain.
You weren’t there in the IE6 trenches, trying to debug layout issues that only happened if the moon was in retrograde.

Or clicking through Flash UIs that crashed if you sneezed.
Or using jQuery before jQuery UI was even stable.

You don’t earn your test stripes until you’ve said,

“Works on Chrome, explodes on IE like a Diwali firecracker.”

📌 Final Answer: Start with Manual Testing.

Then automate like someone who knows what’s worth automating.

Don’t skip learning how to explore.
To break things.
To ask: “What if I do the thing I’m not supposed to do?”

Automation is a scalpel.
Manual testing is the diagnosis.

Without the second, you’re just poking things hoping for a miracle.

💥 Call to Action That Starts Fights

Still confused whether to start with clicks or code? The folks at Ministry of Testing have been debating this since Flash was a thing.

Tag your ‘automation-first’ co-worker below.
The one who wrote 300 tests for login… but forgot password reset.
I’ll wait.

Now if you’ll excuse me—

checks Slack
Oh god, not another P1 bug…