Application Monitoring vs Manual Testing

Developers should learn application monitoring to build more reliable and performant software, especially in production environments meets developers should learn manual testing to gain a user-centric perspective on software quality, catch edge cases early in development, and perform exploratory testing where automation is impractical. Here's our take.

Application Monitoring

Nice Pick

Developers should learn application monitoring to build more reliable and performant software, especially in production environments

Pros

• It is crucial for modern distributed systems, microservices architectures, and cloud-native applications where issues can be complex and hard to debug
• Related to: observability, logging

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

Manual Testing

Developers should learn manual testing to gain a user-centric perspective on software quality, catch edge cases early in development, and perform exploratory testing where automation is impractical

Pros

• It's particularly valuable for usability testing, ad-hoc bug hunting, and validating new features before investing in automation scripts, helping ensure software meets real-world expectations and reducing post-release issues
• Related to: test-planning, bug-reporting

Cons

• Specific tradeoffs depend on your use case

The Verdict

These tools serve different purposes. Application Monitoring is a concept while Manual Testing is a methodology. We picked Application Monitoring based on overall popularity, but your choice depends on what you're building.

The Bottom Line

Application Monitoring wins

Based on overall popularity. Application Monitoring is more widely used, but Manual Testing excels in its own space.