eBook
Business applications grow with time. Testing them manually is a tedious and time-consuming task. Test automation helps overcome these challenges and enables teams to achieve time, cost, and effort benefits. It also allows organizations to be more agile in their development process and deliver top quality.
From improving accuracy to boosting the team’s morale, this ebook discusses the ten significant benefits of test automation and why you should choose it.
What is Test Automation?
Testing applications is one of the critical aspects of quality assurance. While manual testing was the norm until a few years ago, organizations today have started adopting automated testing for good. So, what is test automation?
Test automation is a method of software testing that uses automation solutions to execute the tests. It then generates a report comparing the results with the expected results, helping teams gauge the quality of their applications. Unlike the popular myth that test automation replaces manual testing, it perhaps empowers quality engineers to test more in less time and with less effort.
Why is Test Automation Crucial?
Although nothing can replace what a human mind can offer, manual testing can be, at times, tedious, repetitive, and boring. Moreover, since the applications only grow bigger with time, testing them manually becomes even more complicated, eating up your team’s productive time and effort.
Since manual testing is also prone to errors, the defect injection rate is significantly higher, leading to poor quality software. According to a CISQ report, the cost of poor-quality software in the US was approximately $2.84 trillion. At a granular level, if fixing a bug in the development phase costs $100, the same bug costs $10,000 to be fixed in production.
Test automation reduces the instances of human errors, generating consistent and reliable results every time. This means higher quality, reduced bug-fixing cost, lesser effort, and higher productivity for teams.
What are the benefits of automated testing?
1. Saves Time and Money:
The agile process allows software features to be delivered much faster (ideally, every four weeks or less), significantly speeding up the functionality delivered. This trend gained popularity among tech companies in the early 2000s and has now become a standard practice. As popular as this method is, data shows software testing is the largest bottleneck to speed in the agile delivery process. When GitLab interviewed agile practitioners about the biggest bottleneck in the agile delivery life cycle, over half the respondents mentioned testing accounts for delays in the overall development process. Testing was cited as the greatest obstacle in the race against the clock.
2. Increases Test Coverage:
Complex enterprise application requires a larger team and significant amount of time to carry out end-to -end testing. With test automation, especially no-code, you can test applications of any size, end-to-end, with a few clicks of the buttons in a few minutes or hours. This enables you to test more features across heterogeneous applications and configurations: the result – enhanced coverage and higher quality. Expansive test coverage also increases the probability of identifying the bugs early in the development phase, decreasing production issues and unsatisfactory user experience. The World Quality Report 2020-21 states that ‘requirement coverage by test’ is the primary parameter testers use to assess the quality of the applications and efficiency of the automation solution. Higher the coverage, better the efficiency of the solution, and quality of applications.
3. Improves Accuracy:
The exposure and expertise of a manual tester determine how thoroughly your applications get tested. Test automation, when implemented accurately, removes your dependency on these parameters, delivering expected results every time. Yet another aspect that impacts quality is manual errors. Irrespective of how meticulous a quality engineer is, there is always a possibility of missing a few steps, entering the wrong data, or any trivial manual error – leading to poor application quality. With test automation, you can ensure that your solution will execute the steps accurately without fail and report each step without bias.
5. Enables Reusability :
Manual testing, especially regression testing, can seem extremely tedious as you need to test every minor code change. Writing scripts, running them over and over again is nothing short of a nightmare. With no-code test automation, you need not write test cases or execute them manually when the codebase changes. Instead, your solution creates the test scripts which you can reuse and execute as required without additional efforts or costs. If your automation solution offers pre-built keywords, your efforts decrease furthermore.
6. Offers Faster Feedback :
Yet another benefit of test automation is instant feedback. This feedback loop between developers and testers plays a vital role in delivering higher quality and excellent customer experience. Faster feedback means faster bug-fixing time and lesser downtime. Especially when your product is already in the market, you can fix an error on the go and ensure it doesn’t wreck the customer experience and customer satisfaction. If your automation solution offers pre-built keywords, your efforts decrease furthermore. In manual testing, identifying and pinpointing the bug, fixing it, and testing the new functionality takes way longer and could lead to a bad customer experience.
7. Improves Team’s Morale :
Test automation improves the morale of teams. While this seems like an intangible parameter to assess, the results are often invaluable. A report by McKinsey Global Institute states that in about 60% of occupations, at least one-third of the constituent activities could be automated. Quality Assurance and testing are no different. Test automation takes over the job’s repetitive and mundane parts, freeing humans to do what they do best – brainstorming and ideating. With the new-found time and capacity to focus on challenging and more rewarding tasks, your team becomes more productive and innovative, delivering top-quality work. Test automation also enables QA teams to effectively execute manual tests like usability, exploratory, and ad-hoc tests where automation can’t play a significant role.
8. Promises Information Security :
The quality of your test data broadly defines how effective your testing will be. Unfortunately, manually creating quality test data takes time, testing on copies of live databases. With test automation solutions, you can create and protect your test database and use it when required.
9. Easy Reporting Makes Life Easier :
Reporting in manual testing is cumbersome. It involves constantly updating the number of test scripts written and the number of bugs fixed – creating a dependency on each other. With test automation, reporting is seamless. In a test automation solution like Avo Assure, you get screenshots and videos of the execution of each step, which makes it easier to identify the error and fix it.
10. Offers Scalability :
While manual testing is relatively scalable, the investment and time required to scale can impact the delivery timelines. It simply means scaling in manual testing indicates adding more hands to the project. Getting them on board and training them needs time. Test automation, on the other hand, can scale in a matter of minutes. It simply means adding more test executors to the test automation solution.
When Should You Not Automate Testing?
Automated testing helps organizations achieve time, effort, and cost benefits. However, 100% test automation is never recommended since you shouldn’t rule out manual testing completely. Below are the scenarios when you shouldn’t automate testing:
- Exploratory testing
- End-user usability testing
- Applications that involve strategic thinking and development
– best when a test expert tests all possible scenarios - User experience testing
- Test cases that yield low ROI
- Installation and setup testing
- If automation takes longer than manual testing
- Test cases that are non-repetitive
Why Avo?
With its no-code automation solutions, Avo Automation empowers the largest Fortune 500 companies to transform their business.
With Avo Discover, you can quickly capture, document, modify, and prioritize end-to-end business processes. Avo Assure offers all the capabilities that we just discussed, not just for regression testing but other functional tests as well. The best thing – both Avo Discover and Avo Assure work in unison or individually to help you get the most out of your applications.
- Expand test automation coverage up to 90% by executing end-to-end regression tests repeatedly.
- Achieve over 40% cost savings and increasing employee capacity for innovation.
- Be 2x more productive.
- Leverage about 1400 keywords and reduce testing time.
- Save over 45% of your regression testing effort.
- Deliver high-quality applications at least 3x faster.
- Reduce the production bugs by 80%.
Want to know more about what Avo Automation can do for your business? Reach out to us, and we will schedule a demo for you with our experts.
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