✅ Manual Testing Syllabus (Step-by-Step)
1. Introduction to Software Testing
What is Software Testing?
Why Testing is Important
Objectives of Testing
Quality Assurance (QA) vs Quality Control (QC)
SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle)
STLC (Software Testing Life Cycle)
Types of Testing: Manual vs Automation
2. Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Models
Waterfall Model
V-Model
Agile Model
Spiral Model
Iterative and Incremental Model
Agile Methodologies (Scrum Basics)
3. Basics of Manual Testing
What is Manual Testing?
Tester’s Role and Responsibilities
Test Case vs Test Scenario
Test Plan, Test Strategy
Entry and Exit Criteria
Testing Deliverables
4. Types of Testing (Functional and Non-Functional)
Functional Testing
Smoke Testing
Sanity Testing
Regression Testing
Retesting
Integration Testing
System Testing
User Acceptance Testing (UAT)
Non-Functional Testing
Performance Testing (basic concepts)
Security Testing (basic concepts)
Usability Testing
Compatibility Testing
5. Testing Techniques
Black Box Testing
White Box Testing (basic understanding)
Grey Box Testing
6. Test Case Design Techniques
Equivalence Partitioning
Boundary Value Analysis
Decision Table Testing
State Transition Testing
Error Guessing
Use Case Testing
7. Test Documentation
Test Plan
Test Scenario
Test Case
Test Data
Test Summary Report
Defect Report (Bug Report)
8. Defect Life Cycle / Bug Life Cycle
What is a Defect?
Defect Life Cycle and its States
Severity vs Priority
Bug Reporting Tools (overview)
o JIRA
o Bugzilla
o Mantis
9. Static Testing and Reviews
Static Testing Types: Reviews, Walkthroughs, and Inspections
Checklist for Review
Importance of Peer Reviews
10. Agile Testing (Basic Concepts)
Agile Principles
Role of Tester in Agile
Sprint Planning and Retrospective
User Stories & Acceptance Criteria
11. Exploratory Testing & Ad-hoc Testing
Exploratory Testing Techniques
Session-Based Testing
Monkey Testing
12. Real-Time Project and Test Case Writing
Understanding Requirements (SRS/FRS)
Writing Test Scenarios and Test Cases
Executing Test Cases
Logging Defects
Preparing Test Summary Report
13. Test Management Tools
Introduction to Test Management Tools
o TestRail (or similar)
o Zephyr for JIRA
Creating Test Suites, Test Runs
Traceability Matrix
14. Basics of SQL for Testers
Importance of Database Testing
CRUD Operations (Select, Insert, Update, Delete)
Joins and Subqueries
Writing basic SQL queries for testing
15. Basics of API Testing (Optional but Valuable)
What is an API?
Understanding Request/Response, Headers, Status Codes
Using Postman to Test APIs (GET, POST)
Basic JSON/XML structure
🧪 Final Project (Capstone)
End-to-end Manual Testing on a Sample Web Application
Requirement analysis
Test planning and documentation
Execution and bug reporting
Final Test Summary