5 Reasons to Implement Test Automation In Your Organization
Test automation is one of the big buzz words/phrases in the technology space in 2021. A lot of organizations/companies have started turning their attention towards the quality of their software products, and subsequently investing in test automation.
However, one big question that organizations always have to ask and answer before investing money into test automation, is WHY? Why invest in test automation vs traditional manual testing?
This blog post will delve into 5 of the major reasons why your team and organization should invest the time, effort and resources into test automation.
1. Shorter Testing Cycles
With a significant amount of your tests automated (industry standard is 80%), the speed at which your team is able to run through regression tests significantly reduces. The better the strategies implemented, the faster the speed of tests and validation for the code base going into production.
This in turn leads to shorter testing cycles, and an increased speed to market for features, and products. This can only be a positive for your consumers that want to get new features faster and faster.
2. Increased Test Coverage and Accuracy
Ideally your manual tests would cover the length and breath of your application along with the new features. Realistically, it’s just not the case. Covering multiple scenarios, and data conditions can become a very time consuming task when performed manually, and reperforming these tests during every release cycle exponentially increases the time and cost.
With test automation, the investment is upfront to write the scripts, and programmatically using varying datasets increases the depth of testing while keeping the tests repeatable (More on that in the next point). Additional benefits include consistently covering boundary and edges test cases.
3. Reusability of Tests
A big benefit to test automation is the reusability of the test artifacts that have been created. This can be reusing the same tests or in certain scenarios reusing particular modules of previously automated tests.
The big challenge is at the beginning of the automation effort when these tests/modules have to be designed/scripted for the first time. But once that’s done, the modules can be used across different components, in CI/CD or in certain situations to validate integrating components or applications.
4. Reduction In Human Errors
We are all humans, and therefore are prone to human errors. With manual testing, there’s always a chance of human errors which only increases with the amount of tests each individual team member has to execute.
Test automation significantly reduces the amount of mistakes that can occur during your testing, and consequently increases the reliability of your tests and results.
5. Quicker Build Validation
Another benefit of test automation in your organization is the speed at which builds can be validated. Smoke tests and sanity tests can all be performed within minutes of build completion without human intervention and provide a pass or fail on the latest code version. In more mature test automation groups, this can also trigger a rollback or the deployed code as well.
When compared to manual testing, smoke tests can take up to 2 hrs in some instances, and also require a number of team members to execute.
Images credits: test sigma