Manual testing still has its place

Automated tests are great. Honestly, I can't imagine building a Laravel app without them. I've come to rely on them to guide me in building code that works, and that has a maintainable structure.

But as good as a robust automated test suite is, it doesn't completely replace manual testing of the app as a user. Loading the app in your browser and clicking around like your actual users will do is still quite useful.

For example, I was building a new feature recently, and I had excellent test coverage in place, but when I went to do my final manual test in the browser, I found a show-stopping bug.

I'll admit, this doesn't happen a lot. Automated tests will catch the vast majority of these types of bugs. But it happens just enough for me to make sure I always take some time with manual testing before pushing up my code.

Here to help,

Joel

P.S. I talk a lot about testing and I should probably write a book on it, but until then you can read our book on Laravel validation rules instead.