Test Automation as Key to Higher Product Quality

7 Test Automation Benefits to Elevate Your QA

By: TEAM International | May 13, 2021 | 14 min

What is automation testing , and how can you unlock its real value? Understanding the benefits of test automation is pretty much imperative these days. It’ll help you realize how to get the most out of this approach while delivering high-quality products.

And you know better than anyone that developing products that meet top industry standards is vital. Since software development has become super fast-paced, companies require well-thought-out processes to ensure quality—a need that various testing methods have increasingly supplied.

As QA automation shapes the future of business operations, more executives have realized that the benefits of automation testing are too significant to ignore. Leveraging machines’ power and qualified testers’ experience will provide economies of scale for tasks that may be impossible for humans to achieve manually. Organizations looking to gain efficiency in software testing can take advantage of automation. By doing so, they will enable testers to concentrate on higher-value responsibilities.

We will walk you through the basics, advantages, and best practices to determine if automation testing is the right fit for your business. It’s essential to comprehend how it can add value and solve specific needs within your organization.

Unlocking the power of automation testing

Let’s dive into the basics and determine what qualifies as unleashing the potential of automation testing. When we talk about automation testing, we refer to software that tests your product in place of real-life testers and QA engineers. It supplements manual testing and increases the effectiveness of the testing process. Since engineers develop and release new software applications faster than ever before, the outcome of adopting automated test scripting becomes incredibly efficient.

As technologies play a crucial role today, every tech-savvy business should develop software testing agility and accuracy to keep up. Testing in each stage of the delivery pipeline is an essential part of how companies operate today, and test automation is vital to achieving success. By automating repetitive tasks, managing testing data appropriately, and using insights to enhance software quality, organizations can unleash test automation’s real power.

However, it is essential to use smart criteria to decide what tests your development team should automate. So, let’s point out the differences between manual vs. automated testing.

Manual testing requires physical time and effort. Analysts and testers must create and execute test cases by hand to guarantee that the source code does what it should. It allows a more contextual and nuanced perception of the test results. However, it’s typically too time-consuming and repetitive.

Automated testing appoints specific tools to run multiple test cases at one time. It needs less time in exploratory tests, reducing the feedback cycle. Automated testing tools can cover more operating systems, devices, and scenarios than manual testing, ensuring better error detection.

Automation scripts can replicate almost any test done manually. Hence, determining what tests to automate will require coordinating forces with business stakeholders, developers, and testers. Although this might seem like an extensive process, it will be incredibly profitable in the long run.

At TEAM International, testing software has been part of our services for almost three decades. We’ve helped over 400 customers determine a strategic solution for every testing level and type aligned with their business needs and goals. Our QA approach and test automation frameworks cover all stages, from test outlining to test accomplishment, metrics collection, and reporting. Based on our hands-on experience, we can safely say that unlocking the power of agile automated testing depends on making the right decisions within the project life cycle to reach the most efficient test results.

initial steps to implementing testing automation

Benefits of automation testing

You can get numerous advantages by implementing test automation, including your testers becoming problem solvers instead of problem finders. This way, you’ll encourage them to make processes more reliable and productive. In terms of efficiency, we’ve included the top seven test automation benefits that will make a significant difference in productivity, delivering high-quality results while saving your time and money.

1. Providing faster feedback about overall application stability

Feedback on recently delivered features can take a while, but implementing automation testing reduces the feedback cycle, allowing for more rapid validation in product development processes.

2. Identifying errors sooner

During the engineering phase, developers can detect problems while writing code, not just when they have already deployed it. Test automation enables moving more testing into the build phase, identifying defects or bugs sooner.

3. Improving confidence in applications’ quality at every stage of development

Automated software testing tools allow one single test introduction against various devices and OS versions at once, increasing coverage and confidence in apps’ quality. This is a huge advantage and time saver for companies with clients in multiple parts of the world that have different operating systems.

4. Helping to deliver new releases faster and on a more regular basis

The confidence developed in apps' quality helps to continually produce more successful releases by providing faster feedback and identifying errors early.

5. Decreasing effort required for repeated testing like smoke or regression

A clear sign that you need to consider smoke or regression testing automation for your project is when your tests last several weeks and require considerable work. Reducing testing time by automating scenarios with scripts will help see the system’s impact instantly and with much less dedicated effort.

6. Improving test accuracy by excluding the human factor

Executing tests that require continuous repetition can become mind-numbing, increasing the potential for human errors. Implementing well-designed test cases will eliminate human mistakes.

7. Enhancing test coverage by including test cases that are too costly to be executed manually manually

Using practices like continuous integration testing and performance testing automation allows developers to write more rigorous tests that examine complex use cases, extending the product’s test coverage. On the other hand, manual testing limits the number of tests you can verify.

Although test automation has plenty advantages, it’s not a silver bullet that will completely replace people in terms of testing, at least from our point of view. Nevertheless, it can still offer enormous and reliable help with repetitive tasks and free up time and effort.

Test automation best practices

Once you’ve determined that automated testing is the right choice for your project, it’s time to examine how to set up a secure foundation. Adopting and maintaining automation will come with some initial challenges. However, test automation best practices are paramount to accomplish success and ensure that test cases are fully functional.

Below we share our top best practices that will help you get started and embrace test automation accurately.

  • Decide what tests will be more beneficial to automate
  • Determine suitable automation testing tools for your project
  • Learn how to use AI to automate testing
  • Designate tasks based on the skill’s level of each team member
  • Prepare and create useful quality test data
  • Debug automated scenarios continually
  • Start testing early in the development life cycle
  • Make your script reusable
  • Maintain existing tests and add new ones

Every testing team and organization has unique requirements. Analyze these practices and determine what best suits your business and users. When test automation is implemented, following these practices can magnify its value and speed up time to market.

Fail fast, fail early

Overall, automated testing is a quicker way to get feedback on failures than manual testing. It guarantees quality in a way that manual testing won’t be able to.

Companies considering investing in a test automation platform express their desire to deliver high-standard IT products. If that is your priority, we advocate using automated testing as part of your regular development exercises. It will ensure that your applications undergo adequate tests, giving developers, management, and customers confidence. Indeed, it requires upfront investments and time to develop, but the ROI is worth it. This approach will reduce the workload, eliminate manual errors, and save money and time in the long term.

QA testing is vital to detect errors in software applications or cloud-based services in today’s competitive marketplace. TEAM’s talents and expert solutions can help align your business objectives with technical priorities, create engaging user experiences, and swiftly deploy your software to market across multiple platforms and devices. Let us answer your questions and guide you through the process contact us to get a broader vision of your company’s capabilities.

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