Every product development cycle should include Automation Testing. Testing is essential for developing a product, mainly to ensure its quality. It is crucial for delivering a high-quality product, yet many smaller and mid-sized companies neglect it. As important as it is, it is equally vital to run them properly.
While manual testing isn’t the best approach for every company, some prefer it. Around 33% of companies aim to automate 50% to 75% of their testing processes, and almost 20% aim to automate over 75%. But why would they do so? It is because of the vital meaning it provides. So, in this post, you’ll learn about the purpose of automation testing. But, first, let’s define it.
What Is Automation Testing?
Automation testing is a practice that involves checking software for bugs, glitches, and other issues and improving its quality. A quality assurance method ensures your app is ready for deployment. The automation of testing saves both time and money.
For example, insurance domain testing is a method for testing the insurance application. By checking quality, performance, durability, and consistency requirements before deployment, test automation for insurance ensures the designed insurance application matches customer expectations.
The insurance industry relies heavily on software to run its operations. Software systems help them handle various insurance activities, like developing standard policy forms, managing billing processes, providing quality service to customers, or coordinating between branches.
What Is the Purpose of Automation Testing?
Automated testing serves the following purposes:
1. Reduce Cost
Many businesses cite the initial costs of setting up and implementing automation as the biggest concern. It’s true, but most testers, developers, and management ignore that manual testing costs much more in the long run.
To see what Paul Grossman claims — a lead software engineer — check out his white paper: Automated testing ROI: fact or fiction? His example showed how automation testing could reduce test costs from $78 to $17.54 per hour.
Rather than just looking at the financials, look at the cost of failure when justifying automated tests. How much does the company lose when bugs escape into production and it misses them during manual testing? Are you at risk of losing customers? Does the situation require many resources, time, and money to rectify?
It is essential to have a robust test suite executed repeatedly every time there’s a change to the code. It will reduce the risk of issues spilling into the field. Using automated tests helps detect bugs early in the software development process, which minimizes the chance of delivering faulty software. Ultimately, providing a quality product to the market beats savings or cutbacks.
2. Determines Your Build’s Stability
Test automation enables you to automate tests to ensure your build is stable. The use of smoke testing to validate stability is rampant. A smoke test, however, is sluggish and requires the testing engineer to input data manually, such as creating databases for test data.
You can also use test automation to automate smoke testing. You can create smoke tests automatically and prepare them with suitable databases. It allows you to determine the build’s stability quickly. Essentially, you want to release them as soon as possible and validate their stability automatically.
3. Maximizes ROI
Launching a software product to market takes a long time because of repetitive testing. Automation testing offers many benefits for businesses that maximize the return on investment (ROI), including reducing time-to-market and launching an error-free product by automated tasks with fewer resources, thereby maximizing it.
However, these factors may affect the ROI of test automation:
- A year’s number of builds and releases.
- Cost of test automation tool license.
- Initial design and development of the automation framework and team reskilling took time and money.
- Test automation engineer’s salary.
- Hardware and software costs.
- Product stability.
You can manage all these factors with the correct test automation platform, resulting in an increased return on investment.
4. Reduces Effort
Imagine you are a new developer with little knowledge of how an organization works, its processes, or its codebase. Whatever your skill level or experience, a new developer has much to learn. Can they ensure they don’t feel overwhelmed and don’t neglect tests?
While asking themselves all the pertinent questions, such as how to set up, the release process, and the testing methodology, one question they shouldn’t have to ask is how to do the test. New developers can focus on developing clean, test-driven code with automated tests.
5. Enhance Quality
You can use automated tests to get quick feedback and alert you when a code change is causing the application to fail, but computerized tests alone will not improve quality. Despite mature examinations and automation, there’s no guarantee that no bugs will escape into production.
To improve quality, you must follow correct practices from the beginning to the end of a development cycle. Quality should not be an afterthought but a fundamental component from the start. An Automation Testing alone cannot give a clear picture of the product’s quality.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this article introduces you to automation testing and its essential purposes. It is the most practical way to accomplish most of the testing goals in an Agile world. However, be cautious before selecting the type of automation that fulfills the application’s requirements since no automation can always meet each requirement.
Automation testing is becoming more and more essential in the software development industry due to the fact that it saves time and effort and works quickly. In an agile world where pace and flexibility are important, computerized check-out is especially useful. This helps groups maintain the tempo of improvement and ensures that merchandise meets the perfect nice standards.
Automation testing can be a useful tool, but before you choose an automation method, you should think carefully about what your utility needs. When it comes to automation, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, so it is essential to look up and learn more about the different types of automation to select the one that best suits your needs. You can make sure that your agility initiatives are excellent and most productive with the aid of clever selections and by combining automation testing with manual testing.
