QA Manual Testing Foundations
People starting a career in software testing, and analysts, support staff or developers who already test as part of their job and want a proper method.
- QA and software testing
- Foundation
- 5 days, or 10 half-day sessions
- Instructor-led cohort · In-house for your team · Online, live
What you will be able to do
- Explain where testing fits in a software project, and why a defect found late costs more to fix.
- Turn a requirement or user story into clear test conditions and step-by-step test cases.
- Use equivalence partitioning, boundary values and decision tables to test more with fewer cases.
- Write defect reports a developer can reproduce on the first try, with the right severity and priority.
- Plan and run exploratory test sessions, and report what you covered and what you found.
- Support user acceptance testing and say, with evidence, whether a release is ready.
Testing is a skill, not an afterthought
Most software problems that reach customers could have been found earlier: a boundary nobody checked, a rule the requirement left vague, a payment confirmation that never arrived on a slow network.
This course teaches a method for finding them. You practise on realistic applications, such as an online shop, a school fees portal and a SACCO loan application, not on textbook examples.
How it is taught
Every module mixes a short explanation with hands-on work. You write test cases, run them against a sample application with planted defects, and log what you find. On the final day you run a complete test cycle on your own, from reading the requirements to writing the summary report.
No programming is needed. If you want to go on to automate tests, QA Test Automation is the next course.
Syllabus
Why software testing matters
- Errors, defects and failures, and what each one costs
- The core principles of testing in plain terms
- Quality in context, from a school fees portal to a mobile-money payment
Testing across the delivery life cycle
- Testing in waterfall, agile and continuous delivery teams
- Unit, integration, system and acceptance testing
- Functional and non-functional testing, regression testing and retesting
Reading requirements as a tester
- User stories, acceptance criteria and business rules
- Finding gaps and ambiguities before any code is written
- Static testing and review techniques
Test design techniques
- Equivalence partitioning and boundary value analysis
- Decision tables and state transition testing
- Experience-based testing and error guessing
Writing test cases and test data
- The anatomy of a good test case
- Preparing realistic test data, such as Kenyan phone numbers, KRA PINs, and M-Pesa and other mobile money references
- Traceability from requirement to test to defect
Defects and their life cycle
- Writing a reproducible bug report with screenshots and logs
- Severity versus priority
- Working with developers through triage and retest
Exploratory and mobile testing
- Session-based exploratory testing with charters
- Testing on Android phones, low-end devices and patchy networks
- Basic usability and accessibility checks
Test management and UAT
- Test plans, estimates, and entry and exit criteria
- Tracking progress in a test management tool or Jira
- Running user acceptance testing with business users
- Test summary reports and the go or no-go conversation
Assessment and certificate
- A practical assessment on a sample web and mobile application: you design test cases from its requirements, run them, log the defects you find and write a short test summary report.
- Deefrent Academy certificate, awarded on passing the course assessment.
- Ask for dates and fees. Tell us the course and the format you prefer, and we reply with the next dates and the fee.
Training a whole team?
This course can run privately for your organisation, at your premises or online, with examples drawn from your own systems.
Ready to join the next cohort?
Tell us how you would like to attend. We reply with the next dates, the fee and what you need before you start.