10 Benefits of Automation Testing in a QA Process
If you have been looking for the benefits of automation testing or how test automation simplifies the QA process, you have landed at the right place.
Testing is of paramount importance in product development to ensure quality and deliver a powerful product, yet it is often not conducted properly at times due to a delay in development or an unplanned test strategy.
No matter what, testing should never be compromised. Improper testing leads to a poor quality product and unsatisfied clients. If QA is not your core competency, you can look to outsource QA to someone who holds the specialization in it.
While it’s important to run tests, it’s also crucial how these tests are performed, which brings us to two main testing categories; Manual testing and Automation testing. The latter is what we are going to discuss today and also the benefits of automation testing over manual testing.
What is Automation Testing?
As indicated by the term itself, Automation testing (also referred to as test automation) is a process that focuses on running software tests automatically. This involves writing/developing test scripts or using automation tools to perform software testing.
Benefits of Automation testing
In this fast-paced world where almost everything seems to turn autonomous, the same is the case with software testing. But why is automation testing preferred over manual testing? Let’s find out.
1. Faster Feedback and Validation
Without the help of automation testing, it can take some time to get feedback on the newly built features. Test automation minimizes the feedback cycle and offers faster validation during various phases in product development.
QA test automation also boosts your team’s efficiency as it helps to detect glitches in the product very early during development. As a result, the testing team has to spend less time validating the newly developed features. Not only is it time-saving but also improves communication with the other departments whose job starts after these tests are performed.
2. Flexibility
One of the major advantages of QA automation testing over manual testing is the flexibility it provides to perform testing at any time from any part of the world. Manual QA testing requires real-time execution wherein you need to have your desktop or laptop at the time of testing, unlike QA test automation where you can schedule the test case execution to run from any remote location at any hour of the day.
3. Reduces Costs
Although the initial investment for installing a stable automated testing environment can be high, QA automation helps cut down business expenses, and costs comparatively less than manual testing.
This is because once the automation test scripts are prepared, you are not required to monitor the test executions on a regular basis or troubleshoot if, in case, there’s any script failure. Thus, test automation results in delivering high-quality work by reducing the need to fix glitches after the product release, thereby reducing the overall business expense.
4. Increases Test Coverage
Manual testing comes with a limit on the number of tests you can verify. QA test automation, on the other hand, offers no such restrictions and provides you with sufficient time to write new test cases and add them to your automated test suite. This maximizes the test coverage as more and more features are tested properly, resulting in a quality product or application. Besides, automation testing also enables developers to create more in-depth tests for complex use cases.
5. Browser Compatibility testing made easy
Cross-browser compatibility is an important point to consider when developing a new website or web application. One needs to ensure that the website is compatible with various browsers, operating systems, networks, hardware, and mobile devices.
Executing a browser compatibility test may require creating too many test cases, which if tested manually along with the OS can lead to a delay in the software release. However, if automation testing is applied, it would allow the test engineers to quickly perform tests on a number of browsers, operating systems, and devices at the same time.
6. Reusability
Adding to the benefits of QA test automation is the reusability of test cases. Writing effective test cases is a challenge and requires a lot of time and effort. And it can be a daunting task if one has to write the same set of cases again and again. Thankfully, this is not the case with automated testing.
In automation testing, test scripts, once written, can be reused as many times as you want, saving you both time and effort. You do not always require new scripts even if you come across a change in the OS version of the device. You can make use of your automated test suite for another project.
7. Improves ROI
Due to repetitive testing involved in manual testing, it takes ample time to launch the software/product. This is where automation testing comes in handy.
As I said above that test automation encourages reusability and also the fact that it offers faster validation, it helps to launch the product in the market in a quick span. Also, by lessening the number of resources required for QA testing, it captures more ROI in your business.
8. Higher Accuracy
Humans are bound to make mistakes. Even the best ones in the business can make a mistake during manual testing, especially during a complex use case. QA automation eliminates human errors to a great extent and can perform tests with 100% accuracy.
Though one can commit mistakes even with test automation, the rate of error is significantly lower when compared to manual QA testing.
9. Automation Testing Enhances Manual Tests
Yes, automation testing does provide better benefits but it is not everything you need. The manual approach is essential to come up with unique test cases and scenarios. You can say manual testing serves as the foundation for automated testing. Having quality manual test cases will help you write quality automation test scripts.
So, when you perform manual testing, you can cross-verify the outcomes of the tests with that generated using automation tools, which will eventually help the test engineers enhance the quality of manually written test scripts.
10. Better Insights and Lesser Stress
Automation testing helps you identify the test failures in a better way as compared to manual testing. It provides you with useful insights into the application to analyze what went wrong during the execution. You can get information on the memory contents, file contents, and other internal program states.
This also makes the job of QA testers less stressful as it saves them from repetitive tasks in manual testing and allows them to focus on other tasks.
To conclude, automatic testing not only ensures delivering a quality product but also makes the testing process time-saving and cost-efficient.
We hope this article provided you with enough reasons as to why you should prefer automation testing over manual testing. As I mentioned in the very beginning, if you don’t have the expertise, you can always look to outsource QA services and ensure that the quality is maintained throughout the product development cycle.
Originally published at https://www.dewsolutions.in on January 1, 2017.
