What is automation testing, and how to unlock its real value? Understanding its benefits will help you realize how to get the most out of it while generating high-quality products.
Developing products that meet top standards has become vital. With new software development at a fast pace, companies require well-thought processes to ensure quality, and testing has proved to guarantee product improvement.
As test automation shapes the future of business operations, more business owners have realized the actual value of automation testing. For tasks that may be impossible for humans to achieve manually, leveraging machines’ power and qualified testers’ experience will provide economies of scale. Organizations looking to gain efficiency can take advantage of automation testing; by doing so, they will enable testers to concentrate on higher-value responsibilities.
To determine if automation testing is the right fit for your business, we will walk you through the basics, benefits, and best practices. It is essential to comprehend how it can add value and solve specific needs within your organization.
Unlocking the power of automation testing
To unleash the potential of automation testing, let’s dive into the basics and determine what entitles. When we talk about automation testing, we refer to software that tests your product in place of real-life testers and QA engineers. It serves to supplement manual testing and increase the effectiveness of the testing process. Since new software is developed and released faster than ever before, the outcome of adopting testing automation becomes incredibly efficient.
As technologies play an essential role today, every business with a digital presence must develop software testing agility and accuracy to keep up. Testing in each stage of the delivery pipeline is an essential part of the way companies operate today. And test automation is vital to achieving success. When companies automate repetitive tasks, manage test data, and use insights to enhance software quality, they release test automation’s real power.
However, it’s essential to use smart criteria to decide what tests need to be automated. Let’s point out the differences between manual vs. automated testing.
Manual testing requires physical time and effort; analysts and testers must create tests and execute them by hand to guarantee the source code does what it’s supposed to. It allows a more contextual and nuanced perception of the conducted test. However, it’s typically too time-consuming and repetitive.
Automated testing appoints specific tools to run multiple test cases at one time. It needs less time in exploratory tests, reducing the feedback cycle. Test automation tools can cover more operating systems, devices, and scenarios than manual testing, ensuring better error detection.
Since automation script can replicate almost any test done manually, determining what tests to automate will require coordinating forces with business stakeholders, developers, and testers. Although this might seem like an extensive process, it will be incredibly profitable in the long run.
At TEAM International, testing software has been part of our services for almost three decades. We’ve helped hundreds of customers determine a strategic solution for every testing level and type aligned with their business needs and goals. Our approach and test automation frameworks cover all stages, from test outlining to test accomplishment, metrics collection, and reporting. In our experience, unlocking the power of test automation depends on making the right decisions within the project life cycle to obtain the most of its assets.
Benefits of automation testing
There are numerous benefits to implementing test automation, including testers who will become problem solvers instead of problem finders. They will be encouraged to make processes more reliable and productive. In terms of efficiency, we have included some benefits that will make a significant difference in productivity, delivering high-quality results while saving time and money.
1. Providing faster feedback about overall application stability
Feedback for recently developed features can take a while but incorporating automation testing reduces the feedback cycle and brings more rapid validation in developing products.
2. Identifying errors sooner
During the engineering phase, developers can detect problems while code is being written, not just when it is deployed. Test automation allows moving more testing into the build phase, identifying defects or bugs sooner.
3. Improving confidence in application’s quality at every stage of development
Testing automation allows one single test introduction against various devices and OS versions at once, increasing coverage and confidence in the app’s quality. For companies with clients in multiple parts of the world with different operating systems, this is a huge benefit and time saver.
4. Helping to deliver new releases faster and on a more regular basis
By providing faster feedback and identifying errors early, the developed confidence in the app’s quality helps to produce more successful releases continually.
5. Decreasing effort required for repeated testing like smoke or regression
A clear sign that you need to think about test automation for any project is when regression and smoke tests last for several weeks and require considerable work. Reducing testing time by automating scenarios with scripts will help see the system’s impact instantly and with much less dedicated effort.
6. Improving test accuracy by eliminating the human factor
Executing tests that require continuous repetition can become mind-numbing, increasing the potential for human error. Implementing well-designed test cases will eliminate human mistakes.
7. Enhancing test coverage by including test cases that are too costly to be executed manually
Testing automation allows developers to write more rigorous tests that examine difficult use cases, extending the product’s test coverage, resulting in a higher-quality application. On the other hand, manual testing puts limits on how many tests you can verify.
Although test automation offers plenty of advantages, it is not a magic bullet, and it will never completely replace people in terms of testing, at least from our point of view. Nevertheless, it can still offer enormous and reliable help with repetitive tasks and free up time and effort.
Test automation best practices
Once you have determined that testing automation is the right choice for your project, it’s time to examine how to set up a secure foundation. Adopting and maintaining automation will come with some initial challenges. However, test automation best practices are indispensable to accomplish success and ensure that test cases are fully functional.
Below we share our top best practices that will help you get started and embrace test automation accurately.
- Decide what tests will be more beneficial to automate
- Determine suitable automation testing tools for your project
- Designate tasks based on the skill’s level of each team member
- Prepare and create useful quality test data
- Debug automated scenarios continually
- Start testing early in the development life cycle
- Make your script reusable
- Maintain existing tests and add new ones
It’s necessary to keep in mind that every testing team and organization have unique requirements. Analyze these practices and determine what suits best for your business and users. When test automation is implemented, following these practices can magnify its value and fasten time-to-market.
Fail fast, fail early
Overall, automated testing is a quicker way to get feedback on failures than manual testing; it guarantees quality in a way manual testing will not be able to.
Companies that are considering investing in a test automation platform expose their desire to deliver high standard IT products. If that is your number one priority, we completely advocate using automated testing as part of your regular development exercises. It will ensure that your applications go through adequate tests, giving developers, management, and customers confidence. Despite its upfront cost and time to develop, the investment will reduce the workload, eliminate manual errors, and save money and time in the long term.
QA testing is vital to detect errors in any software, app, or cloud-based service in today’s fast-paced and intensely competitive marketplace. Our talent and expert solutions can help align your business objectives with technical priorities, create engaging user experiences, and swiftly deploy your software to market across multiple platforms and devices. Let us answer your questions and guide you through the process, contact us and get a broader vision of your company’s capability.
