Manual Testing

So where back from christmas and just got a new release up and running. I've been talking with some more experinced QA-people and also been reading some articles on it. They all use some sort of scripts to test their things. A also read that you have to specify what your system should be able to do to effectively do automated tests of it. This and the fact that I thought our testing procedure was a bit unorganized was my main inspiration to make the whole team do some manual testing before this released.

I've compiled a numbers of script like tests that I've put in an Excel sheet. Each tab is divided into different categories, testing different areas of our site. We then sort of divided those tabs between each other and went testing like h*ll. These tests looks like this:
No
1
Description
Successfull log in

Page (if any)
/login

Prerequisites
User goes to login page, types correct password

Expected Behaviour
User is redirected to dashboard

The first thing we came across was how-boring-it-was. A couple of them are ok, but after a while it becomes so slow. So slow. One of the main ideas is of course to automate as much of this as possible. But not everything can be automated, and as you do manual testing you tend to test a whole lot more than just the thing you set out to test. The thing is that humans very soon starts to improvise when they test and therefore catch more bugs. We also learned that you spot a lot of this that you weren't supposed to test, but got tested on the way.

Everybody agreed that this style of testing was way superior and that we caught a lot of bugs we definitely would have missed. But I got to warn about how time consuming this was. Me for example went though some tests, discovered some other, mostly related, bug. Fixed that, submitted the patch and so on. These were almost all small fixes but all in all it took a long time. Better would maybe had been to had noted and reported some bugs but let them slip this release.

Just a note. You can't do without manual testing. You really can't and this more organized style of testing is needed.