With the increasing pace of technology, it becomes challenging for companies to manage the quality of their web applications. Due to the limited time window in agile development and cost factors, testing often misses out the attention it deserves.
Lack of proper testing leads to the bad quality product, delayed delivery, unsatisfied custom service and increase in costs. The reason behind such issues can be an unplanned test management strategy, delay in development and underestimated the effort of creating a test case.
No doubt that the test engineers try to catch bugs or errors before releasing the product. However, bitter truth be told, you can’t catch every bug! So you deploy a quick fix post your migration to production and then regression testing comes into play. Regression testing is very time-consuming but relevant to maintain product stability. In such scenarios, you will find yourself stuck in a vicious cycle where your deployment window will continue to grow narrow. How do we cope with such scenarios? The answer would be automation testing.
In contrast to manual testing, automation testing is an effective way to improve the effectiveness and coverage of the testing process. It came into existence to speed up execution cycles, exempt testers from repetitive tasks, reduce human efforts and provide instant feedback.
In this article, we shall discuss what is automation testing & why automation testing is the right call for your SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle)?
What Is Automation Testing?
Automation testing is a process that involves an automated tool to execute test case suite and predefined actions on a software application. The testing tool takes actual outcomes and compares it with the expected result to generate detailed test reports.
Since test automation demands a considerable investment of resources and money, we should define when to do automation, the scope of the automation and best tool of automation. Good planning practices can save us from high costs. You can find answers to all these questions in our blog to help you start automation testing from scratch.
Benefits Of Automation Testing
Now, that we are done with the introduction, it is time to look at the key benefits of automation testing to help you eradicate the ambiguity on whether automation testing is the right choice for your organization. Here we go!
1. Schedule Your Test Execution 24/7
One of the major benefits of automation testing over manual is the flexibility to execute testing at any time, from anywhere in the world. For performing manual testing you would need to work your way out through a computer for testing a web application. You can’t carry your computer, laptop, everywhere. Also, if somebody asked you to perform a round of testing at 3:00 am in the morning after a long day at work. I am sure you will not find your mood to be very pleasant over the thought. Let alone your comfort.
This is why automation testing is better than manual testing, as in such scenarios you could schedule your test case execution to run at any hour of the day, remotely from any location and analyze the test results by reports generated on the basis of your test suite execution.
2. Easy Regression Testing
Manual testing is time-consuming as for every fix deployed in production, testers have to repeat a set of similar test cases over the same period to ensure that the bug has been removed. Regression testing has been a pain point for every developer. Performing the same test over and over, not only takes more time but also brings down the overall efficiency of a tester.
Performing regression testing manually consumes a lot of time and leads to the following issues:
→ Running the entire regression creates congestion in the release cycle making it inflexible.
→ Manual regression testing cannot be thoroughly performed every time the software gets updated because of the time constraints.
→ Unsurity about whether tests are performed the same way every time.
This is why automation testing is an ideal way to perform regression testing. As discussed in the previous point, automation tests are like robots who never sleep. Therefore, the time window can be extended always to run the regression testing suite. Also, time invested in building an automated test case is a one-time effort, which brings us to our next major benefit of automation testing.
3. Reusability Always Make You Feel Better!
Another major benefit of automation testing the reusability of your test scripts. Writing effective test cases requires a lot of time & effort, and to write the same test cases again could leave one mentally exhausted. This is why automation testing is better than manual testing. When you perform automation testing, you write a test script one time and get to reuse it as many times as you like.
Let’s look at this point from cross browser testing point of view. As you perform cross browser testing, you may need to write test scripts or test cases every time to test an application on different operating systems or devices. Sounds tiring, doesn’t it?
However, the automated test scripts are reusable; you don’t always need new scripts even if the OS version on the device gets changed. It is possible to redo the same test again without forgetting any steps.
With the automated testing tools, test scripts can be reused as many times as you need, ultimately saving both time and efforts.
4. Powerful Test Reports To Help You Analyze Hundreds Of Test Cases With Ease!
In the case of manual testing, testers have to report each other manually to know how many test scripts have been written and what all bugs have been fixed. The whole process is cumbersome and leads to dependency on each other.
On the other side, it is possible for the test automation engineers to view what other engineers have worked on, what scripts have been written, what all test other testers have performed and what bugs were discovered and fixed with the help of clear reports for automation testing.
LambdaTest offers API for automation testing with Selenium to help you extract every inch of information related to automated test suite execution on LambdaTest, even without logging into our platform.
5. Ability To Perform Testing On Multiple Platforms In Parallel
While developing a website, it is essential to ensure the cross browser compatibility over various browsers, hardware, operating systems, networks and mobile devices.
Performing browser compatibility testing requires the creation of countless test cases. Especially, considering the number of browsers versions available in the market. Performing manual testing over hundreds of browser + OS combination may result in delaying the software release process.
However, automated testing allows testers to execute tests on thousands of browsers, operating systems, and devices quickly, and simultaneously.
6. Of course, It Saves You A Lot Of Time!
Without a doubt, automation testing speeds up your test cycles. Relieves you from testing the repeating, monotonous test cases on a daily basis. Allowing you the time and efficiency to come up with better test case scenarios.Companies have to suffer huge losses due to the inability of delivering bug-free releases quickly. I am not saying automation testing will deliver a bug-free release but it definitely will save you enough time to ensure that your web-product stays solid after every change deployed in production. Read our article to know what stops a tester from finding bugs.
7. Reduced Business Costs & Better Utilization Of Manpower
No doubt that the initial investment can be on the higher side, but companies save a lot of additional expenses with automation testing with effective resource utilization.
Once your automation test scripts are all set then you need minimal hands on deck to monitor those test case execution on a frequent basis, and troubleshoot in case of any script failures. Test automation results in a higher quality of work, reducing the need for fixing glitches after the product is released. Therefore, a reduced business expense is one of the significant benefits of automation testing.
8. Shift-Left Testing Done Better!
Shift-left testing is a methodology which conveys that the testing phase should be incorporated into the SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle), right from the requirement gathering phase to find bugs at an early stage. Shift left testing can improve your product quality
Benefit of automation testing is that it can be performed as soon as the development starts, thereby detecting the bugs or defects earlier, helping you to shift-left in a better and faster manner. Run automation tests on user stories to ensure that the story is clear and identifies validations and constraints every tester needs to understand. This approach may help you to detect and eliminate early bugs from your website.
9. Improving The Quality Of Manual Tests
All this time, I have been preaching about why automation testing is better than manual testing but I am not implying that automation testing is all you need! Manual testing is important for coming up with unique test scenarios and test cases. Quality manual test cases will help you write quality automation test scripts. Automation testing helps ease the stressful activity of a manual tester, so they get enough time and bandwidth for coming up with better test scenarios. Also, manual testing serves as the base for automation testing, once you perform manual testing, you can cross-check the outcomes of testing with the help of test automation tools. Results generated from the automation test tools can help testers enhance the quality of test scripts written manually.
10. Maximize The Test Coverage
Manual testing can help you bring quality test case but when we talk about 100% test coverage for a complex web-application. Doing so manually can be very challenging. One of the key benefits of automation testing is that it can help you maximize your test coverage.
Automation testing tools can ease the testing by ensuring the in and out of the software such as databases, web services, UI and so on as per the business requirements. It will, in turn, improve overall test coverage of a web application.
11. Maximizing ROI
Manual testing takes a considerable amount of time to launch a software product to market due to repetitive testing.
However, automation testing can help reduce time-to-market and launch a bug-free product, by taking care of repetitive tasks with less number of resources on-board, thereby, maximizing Return on Investment for businesses.
12. Accelerate Cross Browser Testing
Manual cross browser testing may lead to multiple challenges and problems. In the case of manual testing, testers first identify the browser their web-application must support. After preparing a checklist of all the browsers, they execute a single test on different browser + OS configuration to measure how well their web development efforts are weighing out. Achieving sufficient test coverage may look like a nightmare if you have a wide audience to attend. To prepare for every customer coming at your website from legacy to the latest browser, manual cross browser testing may seem impossible.
Automated cross browser testing tool such as LambdaTest can reduce the efforts by executing the same test cases many times on multiple browsers in parallel.
13. Smoke Testing
Performing regular smoke testing can help you avoid outages and is recommended as a best practice. However, many corporations end up avoiding it as they feel that doing so will end up squeezing the tester’s bandwidth. This is why automation testing is considered so important. You create an automated test build based on your random smoke test scenarios and that is it. Now, you can easily perform smoke testing on a regular basis.
14. Data Driven Testing
Data driven testing is a key benefit of automation testing as it allows you to execute your test cases to validate those functionalities which can be triggered with the involvement of numerous set of data.
15. Distributed Test Execution
Distributing test cases over the multiple machines, OSs or browsers is not feasible in the case of manual testing. Testers can perform testing on any one platform or device at a time to detect the behavior of an application.
Automated testing tools allow distributed test execution by allowing various tests to run on different computers or devices at the same time.
16. Scalability
It is possible to scale manual testing with more number of people and hours allocated for a specific project. The more will be the test cases, the more hands you will need to scale it.
On the other hand, automation testing offers a high level of scalability as you only need to add more test executors to the testing platform or tool.
17. Complex & Lengthy Test Scenarios
Last key benefit of automation testing is to execute error-prone, complex, and lengthy test scenarios the right way, every day. There may be some test cases which may include dozens of reproducible steps. Such scenarios could lead to a faulty assurance by a mere distraction while testing manually. With automation testing, you only have to develop a robust test script once and you are good.
Conclusion
There could be more benefits of automation testing as the industry is progressing immensely around automation. However, the above-presented points are the most key benefits of automation testing in my opinion. What is yours? Feel free to share a way in which automation testing has benefited your test cycles.
Also, keep in mind that manual testing is always needed for better automated test cases. I would also want to highlight that in spite of all the benefits of automation testing, there is still a chance that you may fail in delivering your project on time. This could happen due to many factors but the most critical and common would be the wrong selection of your automation testing tool. Remember, automation testing is highly tool dependent and there are many vendors in the market to choose from. Make sure you pick the right one! If you are looking to perform cross browser testing then LambdaTest is going to store for all your testing requirements. Happy Testing!
Published on Java Code Geeks with permission by Smriti Arya, partner at our JCG program. See the original article here: 17 Key Benefits Of Automation Testing For A Successful Release Opinions expressed by Java Code Geeks contributors are their own. |
