Why Test Automation?

Test Automation Practice is trending in this fast paced world and surely it is a long term objective for QA folks. Businesses have visions on how they can save the cost and time, how quality confidence can be increased, how manual testers can reduce total regression time and enhance time to release.Test Automation helps reduce the efforts and accelerate the time to market for sure, if only these businesses would invest the time/cost required to implement this strategy correctly. Test Automation is required and important for development environments.

Key Benefits of Test Automation

1. Utilize Test Resources and accelerate new development
There is always a scope for validating new development while                   minimizing/automating manual regression tests

2. More Coverage
Offers flexibility to QA team in agile environment within the sprint time line.

3. Re-usable Tests
If Business flows are automated then few test components can be re-used across different business flows and across different Tests (Smoke, Sanity, Regression, and Integration).

4. Prompt Results on Stability
Developers are notified immediately if the build fails to pass the automated script run after deployment.  This ultimately eliminates the need for QA to spend time identifying issues.

5. Reduction in Re-work cost
Due to Test automation the defects get uncovered much ahead of time that gives sufficient time for development team to take corrective actions. As a result of which lot of Development as well as Testing efforts get saved.

6. Accelerate Product Time to Market
​Typically re-work time increases due to late defect discovery in SDLC. Test Automation expedites defect identification process. Due to which re-work efforts reduces and quality confidence increases. Organizations are able to publish products in market before or in committed time.

Factors to be considered before going for Test Automation

Potential Challenges

1. Time constraint, Willingness and Preferences to Automation
Everything is bound to time in this fast paced world and time is really LIMITED to automate manual regression test cases. Still this is not a time constraint per say, it is up to the entrepreneurs/management to enable the QA department to allocate time for automation tasks to make the automation a success. 

This approach really encourages QA folks to get trained and educated on Automation by spending productive time creating those initial automation test scripts.

2. Time to Automate
It’s not time to implement automation in the early phase of release unless you have core functionalities built in the system.
Initiation of Test automation happens and works better during the launch of Version 2 of the system.

3. Tools / Framework
Implementing test automation requires detailed study on automation tools/custom framework and varies from company to company.
Though it’s a long term and beneficial plan, organization need to allocate budget and plan to look for software testing vendors to offers such services/custom built automation framework

4. Cost of Tools
​It’s not a good practice to procure license for each QA resource to access the tool. It attracts more expenses every year!
Referring to point #3, it’s a vendor who can offer best test automation tool/framework, which will take care of quality of system along with standard processes.

Never too late          

1. Get the custom automation framework based on the need from the automation expert.

2. Provide adequate training for QA staff/ business representative to automate their own tests without requiring any technical programming language.

Read more about our Action Driven Framework - Automatics