How Automation adds value to your testing
The importance of software testing is imperative. It is essential in order to deliver a quality product to the customer. However, the fast-paced development environments of the present times often create time and cost constraints. Traditional manual testing is a slow process of executing test cases manually, one step at a time. This is where automation testing comes into the picture. In automation testing, all test scripts are written once and executed automatically whenever the team wants. Test automation increases overall software efficiency and ensures robust software quality. The team executes more tests in less time, with improved overall test coverage.
Now let’s find out more about how automation adds value to testing.
What are the key benefits of Automation testing?
1. Accuracy and Reliability
Manual testing can lead to more errors when running the same test cases over and over. That will exhaust the tester and mistakes are to be expected. Automated test scripts can follow the same test steps consistently time and time again. They get the same results when the expected test criteria are met. Automation testing prominently reduces human error that can occur in manual testing environments, and makes test results more accurate. This essential in order to release a high-quality product.
2. Increased Test Coverage
Through the implementation of automated tests, you can improve the quality of testing by expanding both depth and the scope of testing. Testers can cover most possible scenarios by generating test data with automated test suites. This leads to a higher test coverage whereas manual testing would need a larger team to achieve this goal within the limited time they have.
Apart from this, test automation can perform GUI validations, performance testing, security testing, cross browser testing, and many more, much easily while surpassing manual testing.
So, increased test coverage ensures higher quality of the product.
3. Reduced Expenses
Implementing an automation test suite is an investment. At the initial setup, the cost will be higher for automation testing than manual testing. But, in the long run, the cost and effort invested in manual testing are significantly reduced with automation.
4. Saves Time
When the project grows, many new functionalities and requirements will be added to the project. So, the number of things to be tested will be increased. Manual testing will take more time and is prone to errors.
One of the major advantages of automation testing is testers can schedule and run their tests anytime. So, the scheduled test cases will execute with minimum human interaction and the test results will be shared once it is done. This allows for the testing to be carried out repeatedly, delivering faster results each time with lesser effort and time.
5. Easy Regression Testing
Regression testing is performed after every iteration or intermediate release, to ensure that the new code modifications have not introduced any errors in the overall functionality of the application. Manually performing regression testing takes time and rarely identify new issues as testers can easily get bored by executing the same test suite hundreds of times.
Automated regression testing allows to detect bugs that are often let slip by manual testers, and saves execution time.
6. Reusability of Test Scripts
Most of the time automated test scripts can be reused with minimal or no changes in the script, and it is much easier to setup configurations. As an example, testers can reuse test automation scripts in a different application for the same functionality, like login module. In this case, tester can use the same code and execute test cases much easily, only the test data will be different. In manual test execution, testers have to execute testcases one by one for different inputs even when test scenarios are similar. Reusability of automation scripts will help in saving time and cost.
7. Ease of Test Reporting
Test reporting is an essential part of testing. It will be a bit of hectic work to manually prepare a good test report, which contains a summary of all test activities and the test results. Meanwhile, automation test tools take test reporting to a next level. Every test script executed can be reported in visual logs, including more details like screenshots, screen recordings and error logs. Using these reports, any team member can easily identify the root cause of a bug. After executing a test suite, user can get a better idea of the test results of the whole test suite.
Conclusion
Automation testing results in time and effort saving, cost reduction, increased accuracy and reliability, fast feedback, and increased productivity.
The above mentioned are a few examples how automation testing adds value to traditional testing. As a result, it improves the brand image, generates higher profit, and ensures customer retention by being able to release high quality products on time.
References
1. https://www.testcraft.io/software-test-automation-values-organization/
3. https://www.mindk.com/blog/automated-testing-benefits/
4. https://www.testim.io/blog/test-automation-frameworks/
5. https://blog.qasource.com/how-automation-adds-value-to-your-testing
About the Author
Roshika Gunarathne works as a Senior Quality Assurance Engineer at 99X Technology.