Why Test Automation Is An Important Part of Software Testing Services

Competition fuelled by rising customer expectations, the advent of new technologies and changing market dynamics has brought into sharp focus the importance of product quality. To keep the competitive edge and meet the growing appetite of customers for quality products, companies perforce are releasing more number of products. This has brought to fore the role of software testing services for validating the quality of products. Also, the adoption of Agile has come as a short in the arm for companies looking to market their products faster. This has forced the software testing services to go for test automation.

Why Test automation?

The manual way of testing leaves much to be desired. It requires testers to sit before the computer screens for long hours and try out various combinations of variables for a multitude of devices, platforms and operating systems. In doing so, the testers check if the test outcomes are on expected lines. So far so good, but manual testing is highly time consuming and a repetitive task, which is not conducive to a sustained human effort.

Manual testing can leave a lot of glitches to go unchecked, which can not only bring down the product quality but impact the customer experience to a great extent. This results in increasing the cost of making amends later not to speak of losing the customer trust. This is where altering the software testing methodology from manual to automatic mode can help matters. For test automation brings down the testing time drastically, increases the test coverage area, and ensures the optimum use of available resources. Test automation performs predefined actions repeatedly to check if the outcomes match the expected behaviour.

The test results so obtained in the form of success or failure are logged into the dashboard for test engineer(s) to draw suitable conclusions. However, not all processes are needed to be automated thanks to the huge initial cost involved and the effort needed for maintenance. The latter is important as the automated test scripts are needed to be made a part of the production code till the lifecycle of the product. Thus, as a suitable software testing methodology, test automation is more suited for large enterprises with deep pockets rather than the smaller ones with a limited budget.

The best part of using test automation as the preeminent software testing approach is about creating the primary test script once and then adding further tests into the regression suite. Let us find out how automation in software testing services has benefits for the business and most importantly, customers.

Enhances test coverage area: One of the many drawbacks of manual testing is conducting lengthy tests with multiple variables. This forces manual testers to often ignore certain types of testing. On the other hand, thanks to the automated running of scripts mostly unattended, test automation covers the entire test coverage area. It looks into various aspects of a product like its memory contents, databases, and file contents to check if the behaviour of the product is in accordance with its expected behaviour. It scores over manual testing by a large margin for its ability to process complex test cases innumerable times.

Improving quality: No matter how diligent and persevering a manual tester might be, he or she is prone to make mistakes. Test automation as a part of software application testing, on the other hand, can execute complex tests repeatedly and record them for further analysis. The comprehensive testing leads to a better identification of glitches besides enhancing the product quality significantly.

Optimizes time and cost: Software codes should be tested for each and every modification across devices, platforms, and operating systems. This is time consuming if done manually. Automated testing can run faster and at no additional cost. In fact, test automation can reduce the testing time from days to hours thus saving cost. Moreover, the number of testers needed to create and run automated testing is far less than what is needed to execute the manual one. The number of testers so reduced can be deployed elsewhere in more productive tasks.

Better feedback: The high efficiency of automated testing ensures test outcomes are properly recorded and passed on to the testing team for a thorough analysis.

Conclusion

The successful completion of test automation garners multiple benefits for all stakeholders. Apart from delivering quality products within a quick turnaround time, it fosters a better user experience, brand recall and realization of ROI.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.