In our project, test procedures and expected test results (test specifications) are created in a document. Then, we perform testing on a built product / release. Here, no test codes nor test tools are involved.
Is this acceptable for unit / integration testing?
Is this acceptable for unit / integration testing?
No. what you describe is neither unit nor integration testing, it is taking the build for a walk around the block to get a cup of coffee.
Unit testing is - as I understand it - the testing of individual units of code. Relatively low level and usually developed at the same time as the code itself.
To do that you need to be working in code as well and ultimately the code that performs these tests is testing tool even if for some reason you aren't using a framework.
So no, if you aren't using testing tools or testing code, you aren't doing unit testing.
Theoretically you could be doing integration testing manually, but it's still unreliable because people tend to be inconsistent and expensive because people are slower than machines.
Ultimately the more testing you can automate, the faster and more accurate your tests will be and the more you will free your QA personel to test things that can only be tested manually.
What you are doing is "manual testing".
Manual testing per definition is not, and can never be unit testing.
Manual testing can be used for integration testing, and in fact should be used to some degree, because automated tests cannot spot all forms of unexpected error conditions. Especially bugs having to do with layout and things not "looking right" (which happen to be rather common in web apps).
However, if you have no automated tests at all, it means that your application is insufficiently tested, period. Because it's completely infeasible to manually test every detailed aspect of an application for every release - no organization would be willing or able to pay for the effort that would require.
Unit and Integration testing are two very different things, and what constitutes "acceptable" depends entirely on your organisation. It may very well be acceptable to test the system, rather than each unit separately.
Personally, I'm not a fan of automated unit testing, since the vast majority of issues I encounter are the sort of things that only ever come to light in the context of a system test.
I tend to develop incrementally, so that as what I'm working on grows, it becomes its own test harness, and foundations are proved to be solid before building anything on them.
I'd love to be able to automate system testing. It reveals all the things I would never have thought of in a million years of writing unit tests.