With more and more organizations utilizing DevOps and Agile methodologies to deliver software projects, there is now a greater demand for performance and power than ever before. As a result, automated testing is becoming increasingly important for organizations seeking to keep up with the speed of modern software delivery.
According to a recent NASSCOM survey, a quarter of respondents have automated between 51% and 75% of their testing processes, showing how important this method has become for many businesses.
However, in addition to the need to keep up with the competition, automated testing has plenty of other advantages over more conventional and time-consuming manual testing.
Automated testing, in particular, enables products to be delivered even more effectively and efficiently, possibly saving the company time and money.
We’ll take a closer look at some of the other advantages in this blog, as well as why your company should accept automated testing in 2021 and beyond.
Ease Quality Assurance Issues
Quality assurance should be high on everyone’s priority list when it comes to enterprise IT and software development at any point of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). As a result, if you want to achieve the required standards of quality, testing is an essential part of the SDLC. With this in mind, automation can be used to improve the efficiency of your testing processes by introducing more precision, regularity, and continuity.
You can significantly reduce the chance of any bugs going unnoticed by using automated tests, which is always the case with manual testing. Automation guarantees bug-free product delivery and can carry a significant portion of the quality assurance burden for your project.
Improve Accuracy by Removing Human Error
Similarly, as you turn to an automated approach, manual test errors and the possibility of human errors will be significantly reduced. Every time you run an automated test, it will go through the exact same steps. Although it’s best to keep your trained QA and software testing experts working on the areas of your project that are most important or are under the most risk, automated tests may be useful in other areas if used correctly. Tests that must be performed repeatedly should be automated, since this is where human error is most likely to occur.
Once automated tests have been developed, they can be run indefinitely at no additional expense, offering a truly worthwhile return on investment.
Limitations imposed by humans must be removed.
Automated testing is not restricted by the limitations of human staff, such as working hours or the need for daily breaks, which offers yet another significant benefit to your project’s productivity. To optimise product delivery, you can set automated tests to run on a timer and run these test cases overnight outside of normal office hours, allowing you to speed up the project and adhere to tight deadlines. This has the ability to cut software testing time in half, from days to hours.
Make the best use of your resources.
When approached manually, quality assurance is often highly monotonous and repetitive, but automation can remove these mundane tasks, saving testing engineers time and effort that can be spent elsewhere. When your test cases are automated, they can be run with the click of a button, saving you hours of manual work and allowing you to concentrate your time on areas that are either more risky or more relevant.
These testing engineers will then use the additional time to add more value to the overall delivery by bringing in more creativity to the project.
Minimize the need for specialized knowledge and skills
Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can be used to achieve more intuitive levels of automation, allowing the QA and testing phases to be streamlined much further. AI can quickly detect any advanced improvements, such as UI changes or database updates, when used to improve automated testing.
Your automation can handle even more complicated testing procedures that would otherwise necessitate the use of engineers with specialized expertise if performed manually. Your automation can handle even more complicated testing procedures that would otherwise necessitate the use of engineers with specialized expertise if performed manually.
Increase your test coverage.
Automation will help you increase the depth of your testing by allowing you to run thousands upon thousands of complex test cases at the touch of a button, maximizing effect with a fraction of the time and effort. As compared to a manual approach, the depth and coverage testing engineers can achieve with automated test cases is unmatched.
Gain Perspectives and Reduce Feedback Cycles
Automated testing will not only offer more depth and coverage, but it will also provide much shorter input and results times, enabling you to accelerate delivery much more. Faster feedback also increases overall productivity by streamlining coordination among all project teams.
Simultaneous Testing on Multiple Platforms and Devices
These automated test scenarios can also be used to test product consistency across multiple operating systems, platforms, and devices at the same time, particularly as mobile and cloud become more prevalent in enterprise IT.
There is no need for manual testing to verify the product’s compatibility with various systems because automated tests can do it easily and reliably, saving even more time and effort.
Test Against Extreme Situations
Automated experiments can simulate almost any fictional scenario, allowing you to test against problems that a conventional QA method simply could not.
For example, automated testing allows you to test applications under the burden of thousands of users at once, which would be nearly impossible to do manually. The more scenarios you test for, the lower your chances of your programme failing in development.
Time to Market can be accelerated.
Automating processes makes things move faster, shortening project timelines and increasing delivery speed, allowing you to stay within budget. When you integrate automated testing into your software delivery, your product or application will usually be brought to market in less time due to the increased speed and efficiency in all of the areas mentioned above.
Less time spent on the project means lower costs, which means significant savings for your company and a higher return on investment.
Conclusion
In today’s DevOps-driven environment, automated testing is both the present and the future of software testing and QA. Automation is a logical step in integrating creativity into the software development process, and it opens up plenty of new possibilities for product quality assurance.
Besides that, eliminating time-consuming manual testing in favor of automation is the only way for your business to stay competitive in today’s software delivery. It’s important to note that these advantages favor not just your company’s time and resources, but also your testing engineers, product managers, end users, and everyone else.
Automated testing should not be seen as a way of removing responsibility towards quality from the project. It’s important to remember that these automated experiments are only one of several interconnected parts of the overall SDLC. Also with automated testing in place, quality assurance should remain a top priority, as they should work together to reach the highest possible standards of quality in the production process.
