Testing automation came into existence as we all need to do more testing in the fastest manner, but to derive the best ROI for testing automation, it becomes quite blurry. You may have to be justifiable while implementing testing automation all over your organization.
Moreover, in the era of Agile, CI/CD and DevOps it has become imperative to balance together with the three major elements that are: quality, speed and cost to test more features in less time and expect the integrations to be more functional and innovative.
In this post, we would discuss the ways with which you can get the best ROI in testing automation.
Balancing Trifecta of Speed, Cost and Quality
All development teams always try to maximize the trifecta of speed, cost and quality and often found this step as a challenging one. Quality assurance teams always face this challenge and take tough decisions to give their best result.
In this situation, the teams may have to deliver the product faster but may have to compromise its quality. So most of the teams automate all the repeat testings to reach their optimization goals quickly.
If the testing team is adopting automation to balance the release pressure and product quality, then the organization must surely measure the effect of this investment on capital and efforts. To determine the return on investment or ROI, define your exact expectations and compare the gains of this automation with the cost or investments. In this way, you can easily measure and compare both the factors to evaluate the investment.
Don’t Avoid Manual Testing
When you initiate your automation testing then just try to avoid the requirement of classic manual testing:
- Manual testing will always remain in demand and required by the professionals, though automation may be important for your team and product and increase the team importance, so still, you may need manual contribution at many places.
- Automation testing is being used for redundant or repetitive testing requirements as it becomes a tedious task to test a module repeatedly. At some places to test navigation menu or to check a website aesthetically or for any straight-forward testing or to check the user-friendliness of the website you may probably need the manual testers.
- You should synchronize the automation tools and organizational capabilities. One should always maintain the testing automation knowledge with product knowledge.
- Perpetual test maintenance or regular maintenance and update of test cases is always expected. By the addition of new functionalities and product update or improvement, your test suite will surely perform well. Try to maintain your test case reliability and relevancy throughout the project lifecycle.
Know the Tests that Need Automation
Many tests need human interventions like testing of system behaviour and performance. In such cases, automation will not be beneficial. Moreover testing automation is usually done for repetitive or mundane tasks and automation of such testing tasks decrease the product delivery time and cost significantly. Moreover, by automating these tasks, the team members can focus on many other imperative tasks.
At the same time, testing automation can save money and effort but it cannot guarantee software product quality. In fact, too much testing automation can eventually decrease testing efficiency. So, one must plan which tests really require automation and can increase product quality and decrease its delivery time.
Just research in advance properly and thoroughly to know the tests that really need automation and evaluate the tools to know which the best ones for your tests and prioritize them as per their performance. Moreover, train the development team so that they can use the appropriate tools effectively. Make sure that all testers will construct effective and relevant quality test-cases.
The inclusion of All Types of Testing
No matter up to what extent you have implemented automation testing for your product, it is imperative that your testing team should perform all types of testing across the full product development lifecycle:
- Unit Testing: Unit testing is one of the most abundant types of testing for any software product that is performed throughout the product development lifecycle. Many unit tests are considered as perfect tests for testing automation. With time you can either build a fully-automated unit test or can perform it as parallel testing so that for large projects even thousands of unit testing tasks can be performed just within an hour.
- Cross-Browser Testing: Conventionally it consumes a lot of time to test and validate the app for multiple browsers and automation of this testing can save your time up to much extent.
- Smoke-Testing: Prepare smoke test cases so that testing can be done in 20 minutes of time and then maximize the testing amount in the shortest amount of time. Run automated smoke tests in parallel to save testing times.
- Regression Testing: Successive build and software release is quite often. Regression testing can compare the performance of a new release with the older ones to test the stability and user experience of the newer one and compare the performance of both the versions.
To make the tests effective, the testing automation tools should be able to provide you with record and replay capabilities coupled with automatic functionality, easy test configuration and change detection. The tools with automated data-driven testing capability can enhance the team’s performance so that they can perform any data-driven test randomly. Moreover, they can run any test in a pre-specified time and can easily expand their test coverage to minimize the inaccurate tests. In this way, your team can plan and test the product effectively.
Wrapping it up!!
While manual testing may still require quality products, but at the same time, one cannot ignore the benefits of testing automation. Industries are adopting automated testing to reduce their development time aggressively. Moreover, to deliver a quality product and stay competitive, many organizations either have already adopted testing automation tools or are planning to do so.