Testing is an integral part of the software development life cycle. Every business that wants to develop a product must adopt them to ensure that their products are defect-free and meet the desired quality.
Testing is essential, but how we run these tests is also important. Unfortunately, some businesses prefer to use manual testing, even though they could perform better testing with test automation.
With the ever-increasing software use and development rate, adopting test automation has become even more important, as manual testing is no longer sufficient to provide software testing. Manual testing requires a lot of effort from the developers and testers. Even then, the tested application could still contain bugs. Automated testing delivers a better approach as you leave the bulk of the work to the automation tool.
More and more businesses are now adopting test automation for their software testing. This rapid adoption has led to significant growth in the global market for automation testing. Currently, an estimated 50% (or more) of manual testing has been replaced by test automation, according to the PractiTest report. This article explains some of the benefits that automation testing for your products will give your business.
How Automation Testing Can Benefit Your Business in The Future
Test automation can positively impact your business in many ways – let's dive into some of them.
Faster Delivery
Software testing is a lengthy process. Finding and fixing the bugs or defects requires a long time and effort. There could also be delays when finding the bugs and retesting to ensure that the bugs have been thoroughly eliminated. With test automation, what used to take days or even weeks to fix could only take minutes.
The automation testing process automatically compares the test results to the expected results and executes more tests in a shorter amount of time, which allows us to generate quick feedback, track progress, and receive data-driven answers on how to improve the product.
Let's use regression testing as an example. Test automation can speed up the testing process and reduce the time between integrating a new feature and releasing new updates to the market. As a result, you will be able to remain competitive in the market.
Reduced Business Expenses
Employing automation testing will help you to save money in the long run. Software testing is a continuous process; you must test your product every time you make changes to the code. In addition, you have to use it in different operating systems, configurations, and user journeys to ensure it is bug-free. Doing this manually will involve an enormous amount of effort and higher costs. And because of the increasing number of applications, the cost and effort only grow exponentially.
By automating tests, you can run them repeatedly without incurring any additional costs. Aside from that, it is faster. Unlike manual testing, the testers can conduct automated testing 24 hours a day, which means running tests for an additional 16 hours a day. The result is a reduction in time-to-market and faster delivery of functionalities.
Improvement in Testing Efficiency
Automation testing is a hundred percent efficient because the automation tool handles all the testing processes to deliver high-quality testing every time. In the case of manual testing, you will have to rely on the exposure and expertise of the tester for efficient testing. But on the other hand, test automation can execute the tests accurately without fail.
There is also the problem of unwanted errors. We are human, and mistakes can happen in the testing, which could lead to the wrong test results. Test automation eliminates the possibility of errors in software testing.
Higher Test Coverage
Another benefit that automation testing can give your business is higher test coverage. Test coverage refers to the aspects of the software that will be tested. In the case of manual testing, it may be challenging to get complete test coverage for complex applications; performing in-depth tests will be too much work for your developers and testers. But with automation testing, you can achieve end-to-end testing on any application, regardless of the size and complexity.
A higher test coverage means you can test more features and, subsequently, get a greater chance of identifying and removing all the bugs. This will help your business to experience fewer production issues and improve user experience.
Reusability of the Test Suite
As stated earlier, software testing is continuous; you have to test every minor change to the code to ensure that there is no regression and that the product works as expected. This could be tedious because you must write test scripts every time you want to perform software testing.
In contrast, you can easily retest with automation testing. You wouldn't have to write the test cases again or execute them manually because automated test cases are reusable. So you can use it severally in different testing approaches.
Better Insights
Automation testing can be beneficial to the developers because it gives insights into the different aspects of the software, including data tables, file contents, memory contents, and other program states. This can help developers quickly identify the defects' location in the program.
