I just discovered an interesting lecture on the problems with scripted manual testing presented by Dr. Cem Kaner, Professor of Software Engineering, Director of the Center for Software Testing Education and Research, at the Florida Institute of Technology.

Dr. Kaner talks about the problems associated with testers using scripts for manual testing. You'll learn what a manual test script is and why he believes that having testers manually execute procedural test scripts isn't very useful.

Also, Dr. Kaner touches on the psychological aspect of this kind of testing and compares the psychology of manually performing step-by-step instructions with an experiment he did on rats and technical support staff.

I was really impressed with his presentation style. He discusses the problem in plain English and provides clear examples. The lecture is accompanied with slides that contain short illustrative sentences. It's easy to understand and being a testing newbie, it helped me learn more about manual testing. I hope you'll find the lecture as interesting and useful as I did.

The first part of the lecture - 15 min.

The second part of the lecture - 28 min.

The third part of the lecture - 4 min.