With a prolific advancement in technology and the mobile space, it is becoming extremely taxing for IT companies to maintain the proficiency of app development. Even though automation testing has a lot of business emphasis on and around it, it is often neglected due to the various cost and time constraints. This is a major hindrance to the consumer cycle due to:
- Heavily compromised end-product quality
- Customer dissatisfaction
- Delay in delivery
- An overall increase in quality-related costs
There can be several reasons for such a sharp increase in maintenance and testing costs. To name a few:
- An ineffective test strategy
- Faulty test-cases
- Delay in testing
- Pacing up with device fragmentation.
In order to overcome such a growing ordeal test automation came into the picture. In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive software development industry, the need for efficient and effective testing methods is more important than ever before. Automation testing is a software testing technique that has gained significant popularity in recent years due to its ability to improve testing efficiency and accuracy.
What is Automation Testing?
Automation testing uses an automation tool to execute the test case instead of a human manually executing the suite by following step-by-step instructions. So the main goal of automation testing is to reduce the number of test cases that has to run manually instead of eliminating manual testing altogether.
Automation testing is pursued not only in the hope of better ROI but also because it increases the area of test coverage and rules out human intervention and human errors. According to a recent report from The Daily Research chronicle, it is being contemplated that automated testing will be on a 100 percent rise from 2019 -2025 amongst the major IT MNCs.
When Should You Automate Your Software Testing?
Automating software testing is a strategic decision that can significantly improve the efficiency, reliability, and quality of your software development process. However, not all testing tasks should be automated, and the decision to automate should be made thoughtfully. Here are some key considerations;
1. Repetitive Tests: Automate tests for frequent tasks like regression testing to save time and ensure consistency.
2. Stable Features: Focus automation on stable software features that are less likely to change often.
3. Large Test Suites: Automate extensive test suites to speed up testing and increase coverage.
4. Data-Driven Testing: Use automation for tests involving multiple data sets to ensure thorough coverage.
5. Performance and Load Testing: Automate performance and load tests for accuracy and efficiency.
What are the Benefits of Automation Testing?
Let us have a look at the top 10 benefits of Automation testing
1. Enhanced Results
Since automation testing saves plenty of time even when complex and enormous systems are taken into consideration. This allows testing to be carried out repeatedly, delivering better and faster results with significantly lesser efforts and reduced time.
2. Swifter Feedback system
Automation testing is extremely crucial during the validation phase of any software project. It significantly enhances communication among the developers, designers, and product merchants, and provides space for the potential glitches to be rectified immediately thus enhancing the efficiency of the development team.
3. Brand Enhancement
The effectiveness of testing is always dependent on the quality of test data that is being used. Testing is often performed on the copies of live databases as creating relevant and quality test data takes copious amounts of time. Automation solutions allow you to re-use your data time and again. This saves a lot of costs from project handling and project maintenance perspective.
The best aspect of automated testing is that it adds value to all the attached stakeholders. Automated testing systems not only enhance the system’s capability but also pave the way towards digital innovation and revolution. It not only improves the brand name but also increases brand recall value, thus ensuring far greater customer retention. Due to automation testing, there are permanent fixes generated to issues long pertained as unsolvable.
4. Cost-effective
Even though the initial investment needed for automation testing is on the higher end, it saves a lot of money for the company in the longer run. It is predominantly due to the reduction in the amount of time required to run the tests. It also contributes a much higher quality of work as there are no chances of neglect or human error. This decreases the necessity of fixing glitches in the post-release phase, thus saving huge amounts of project costs.
5. Efficiency Testing
Testing is one of the most pivotal parts of the entire application development cycle. The most attractive part of the automation testing is that it can be left virtually unattended. This leaves a lot of room for the results to be monitored towards the end of the process. This allows for increasing the overall efficiency of the application.
6. Increase in Coverage Area
Through the use of automation testing, more tests can be allotted pertaining to any application. This leads to higher testing coverage and a reduction in software anomalies. It also allows room for testing more features and complex applications. However, in order to the same thing in a manual testing scenario would require a massive team along with heavy time constraints.
7. Detailed Testing
All testers tend to have different testing approaches with different focus areas as per their exposure and level of expertise. With the help of automation, there is an equal focus on all areas of testing, thus assuring the best possible quality of the end product with greater emphasis on each aspect of the product. Automation testing is known for its atom level approach of testing due to which it is considered error-free.
8. Reusability
Test Automation is repetitive in nature due to the nature of its test automation cases. In addition to an easy setup configuration, it gives the software developers an opportunity to assess the program’s reaction. Automated test cases are totally reusable and hence can be utilized for testing any aspect of the code as per significance and through a plethora of different approaches.
9. Earlier Detection of Defects
Automation testing documents the software defects and hence making it considerably easier for the testing teams. This also makes it relatively easier for the development and support team to together contemplate the defects and give a faster output. The overall development speed of the project is increased while ensuring correct functionality across relevant areas. The earlier any defect is identified, the better and cost-efficient it is to solve and deploy it.
10. Time to market
Test automation helps significantly in reducing the time-to-market launch of an application. Automation testing allows constant and regular execution of test cases. Post automation the test library execution is extremely swift and runs longer.
End Thoughts
Through the above-mentioned factors, it can be clearly established that automated testing results in significant cost and time reduction along with putting the manual efforts into the right use. It paves way for swift feedback thereby contributing to maximized profits. Automation testing can be considered a difference-maker for the Small and medium enterprises for their constant combat to gain a sustainable competitive edge and advantage. Automation testing is something that can be considered a change wave of functionality in the IT domain.
If you’re considering outsourcing your test automation requirements, consider partnering with Testrig Technologies, a renowned QA and automation testing company. Our team of skilled professionals is dedicated to assisting you in reaching your software testing objectives and delivering top-notch software.
