Test automation has been emerging as a favored mode of QA for digitally thriving organizations.
- Industry experts believe that if you spend less than 10% of your budget on test automation, you are lagging behind your peers.
- More than 50% of the peers are already automating 50-75% of the test cases.
The need for organizations to evolve their technology infrastructure comes with the requirement of the right QA to ensure quality. While many organizations go with traditional manual testing, automated testing helps them make the process better. However, not many organizations are not well aware of the what, whys, and hows of test automation. Look no further; here is everything you should know.
This article dives into the basics of test automation.
What is Test Automation?
Automation testing is a software testing technique that automates the testing cycle and reviews to validate the software product. It generally involves three phases:
Unit Testing
To validate the code units like function.
Integration Testing
Takes care of pieces of scripts and ensures that the core can work well in collaboration as expected.
End-to-end Testing
Validates that the application is capable of meeting the user's requirements.
Exploratory Testing
Offers an unstructured approach for testing various application areas from the user's point of view and identifying functional and visual issues.
What are the Benefits of Test Automation for Your Business Products?
As a business aspiring to launch your software product in a digitally advanced world, ensuring that the system delivers the expected performance is vital. Even the simplest solutions may need the best level of testing.
Testing is a practical step throughout the software development lifecycle and makes sure each input translates to the right output within a software solution.
However, it is seen that software testers don’t get the full opportunity to test each critical element of the system. A lot is to be tested at each stage of the software, and the slightest time difference can increase time to market and decrease reliability. This is where test automation comes in. Let’s check out some of the unique benefits of test automation for your business’s digital transformation journey:
Let’s discuss the benefits of test automation in detail.
1. Faster and Cost-effective Development and Delivery
Long ago, Amazon used to deploy new software updates every 11.6 seconds, thanks to effective DevOps implementation combined with test automation. Certainly, test automation is a guaranteed way for businesses to accelerate digital transformation while keeping their business investments under control.
Manual aspects of testing come with their disadvantages. Regardless of how efficient and expert they are, QA engineers can only test the software for a specific number of hours. However, once written, automated tests, including techniques like Automated Visual Inspection, can be run as many times as you want. This, thereby, speeds up the testing cycle and avoids the chances of manual errors.
Another aspect of cost and time is bug detection.
Debugging software failure adds up to the cost of software development significantly. It has been estimated that fixing a single bug takes about 13 hours of the developer’s time. Considering this, you don’t just lose investments in terms of development time but also jeopardize your market hold by giving your competitors a chance to launch before you.
Therefore, it will be wiser to detect the bugs earlier and fix them during the development.
As developers compile the code, a test suite automatically detects the bugs and creates a shorter feedback loop. This allows engineering teams to find and fix the bugs faster.
Read More: Everything You Need to Know About Automation Testing
2. Higher Productivity
Each sprint has an inherent testing phase that ensures the software delivers the expected results. To ensure that each phase of the software is high quality, repeated tests are important. QA experts don’t always have the time to perform extensive repeated testing and rather rely on past results to deduce the new outcomes. While there are chances of manual errors and inefficiency in this process, test automation can help you overcome these challenges.
Automated tests can run independently, no matter what time of the day or how many times they need to be run. This lets QA experts focus on more critical tasks and test the new features rather than spending time on the last ones.
3. Better Test Accuracy to Ensure Quality of Solutions
In manual testing, the exposure and expertise of the manual tester translate into the quality of testing. There are always chances of manual errors such as missing a few steps, wrong data entry, or other errors causing poor application quality. Simultaneously, if they feel to observe an aspect they should be, it could cause your digital transformation strategy to fall flat, if not immediately. However, with test automation, you can ensure that the step execution, data input, and more are carefully taken care of. These tests report each step’s results efficiently and improve system quality.
Also Read: Automation Testing for Mobile Applications: A Guide to Ensuring Quality and Efficiency
4. CI/CD and DevOps Implementation
DevOps has been taking the software engineering arena by storm for a few years now. Brands are increasingly investing in DevOps implementation to improve the outcome of the software development lifecycle. Automation testing enables an effective CI/ CD lifecycle for these DevOps teams. CI/CD concept revolves around “build fast, test fast, fail fast.”
This requires the QA teams to perform testing at a pace to allow a faster feedback cycle. Besides early bug detection, it paves the way for higher accuracy and quality. This also ensures higher test coverage and helps generate and compare multiple test results, ensuring product consistency.
5. Faster Feedback Cycle
Feedback loops help development teams ensure that their efforts are translating into results. If not, they can take appropriate steps to ensure better results in the upcoming phases. The quicker the feedback, the better it is.
Automation testing ensures instant feedback for these development teams. Fast execution allows developers to test the software and get reports instantly. Anytime a failure occurs, teams have more time to react. This also ensures that the teams don’t need to brainstorm again on the script written months ago.
Immediate feedback is especially useful when your application has already been launched. You can detect bugs quickly, fix them timely, and deploy the updates.
6. Simpler Regression Testing
Manual testing is time-inefficient. Testers need to repeat a set of similar test cases over the same period to ensure bug-fixing. Regression testing is one of the daunting aspects of testing. Performing repeated tests is tedious and cuts down the testing efficiency. Manual regression tests have traditionally been helping teams. However, executing them is time-consuming and can cause multiple other issues.
- Running regression completely causes delays in the release cycle, making it inflexible.
- Due to time and resource constraints, it is impossible to perform manual regression tests every time software is updated.
- Updates may or may not change the way software is supposed to function. Therefore, there is no sure way to determine how regression tests will run.
This makes automation testing an ideal way to approach regression testing. It allows QA teams to extend their time frame the way they want. They have to create test cases once and leave the rest for the tools.
7. Ability to Perform Testing on Multiple Platforms in Parallel
Various compatibility tests ensure the software offers flawless execution across all possible scenarios. These tests check for the system’s compatibility with browsers, hardware, operating systems, networks, and devices.
For cutting-edge compatibility tests, there are innumerable scenarios to be run to check compatibility with existing, legacy, and upcoming versions. Manual tests may render completely time, cost, and resource inefficient in such scenarios, given the number of browsers, platforms, devices, etc. However, automated tests can execute each test, not once but as many times as you want, simultaneously.
Read More: Why Does Your Enterprise Need Test Automation?
8. Maximize the Test Coverage
Automation testing can help you boost the test coverage for the software, regardless of how complex they are. They can offer as high as 100% coverage, something that can be challenging in the case of manual tests. Automation testing can ensure in and out testing of every functional aspect, such as databases, web services, UI, and more, based on the business needs to maximize test coverage.
Let Matellio Help You Ensure Quality with Test Automation
Accelerate time-to-market for your digital products without compromising the quality of software solutions with our Automation testing services. Our certified testing experts help you launch products that deliver exceptional speed and unmatchable experience across devices and platforms. We are pioneers in delivering an extensive range of automation testing services, including:
Automated Functional Testing: Feature testing, Full system testing, Regression testing, and Unit testing.
Automated Performance Testing: Load testing, Stress testing, Stability testing, and Scalability testing.
Automated Integration Testing: Incremental testing, Top-down integration testing, Bottom-up integration testing, and Hybrid/Sandwich integration testing.
Automated Compatibility Testing: Browser compatibility testing, Application compatibility testing, Software and hardware compatibility testing, Version compatibility testing, and forward and backward compatibility testing.
Automated Software Security Assurance: Vulnerability Assessment, Penetration testing, Infrastructure security audit, and compliance testing.
Are you looking for a custom test automation quote or do you want to upgrade your manual testing process with us? Share your requirements and book yourself a Free 30-minute consultation.
