4 Benefits of Implementing Automation in Testing

Testing is the backbone of every software project. It is more a tedious task than a one-time job to check the quality of the application and the software for every release. Hence test engineers actively participate in identifying glitches in the application. However, with even best manual testing processes, the problems keep appearing, leaving no space for testers to focus on actually improving the application’s performance.

Automation testing as an alternative to manual testing is the best way to rise the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing efforts. Automation Testing means using an automation tool to execute your test case suite. It breaks all the barriers of manual testing, ensuring better usability, coverage, security and scalability.

Most of the companies have started implementing automated testing for accomplishing their regression testing cycles to come out with flawless applications using various test automation tools like Selenium.

Based on the experiences of testers working on automation, we have listed a few pointers on why we feel projects will benefit from automated testing.

Saves Money and Time: This is one of the biggest benefits for me, especially when it comes to regression testing. As we all know, the aim of regression testing is to confirm that the application still works as expected when new features have been introduced or a change is made to an existing feature. In order for us to verify this, we need to run all test scripts associated with the change. There is a risk here – due to time constraints, we may not run all tests associated to the change which may result in undiscovered defects.

These issues can be overcome by setting up our automated tests to run after each deployment – this creates time for the tester to perform exploratory testing, concentrate on areas which cannot be automated and concentrate on other tasks, which, in turn, reduces the investment spends on the resources.

Sufficient Test Coverage: After you’ve designed some test suites for the application, and gotten them all to pass, you may wonder, “Do I have enough tests to cover all the possible scenarios? Am I missing anything?” One way to help yourself answer that question is to measure the coverage of your tests – that is, how thoroughly your tests exercise the application’s code. Automation is one of the ways to achieve the test coverage of the application in a short span of time.

Reusability/Repeatability: Reusability should be built-in in all areas of Software Testing. We’ve outlined a possible set of such areas here – designing test cases, churn out generic test cases for some of the major areas of your project, build frameworks that are modular and can be easily reused. Spend that extra time upfront to decide what kinds of reusable data can be created.

Increase Efficiency and Productivity: Testing efficiency is the average number of tests you can run for an hour of tester time.The developer may spend some time to implement the tests, and run the tests with tools like Selenium; the developer can see how the buttons and links in the browser are clicked. And this is done much faster than manual testing. Higher testing efficiency reduces the product development time and cost.

Automation testing does not mean we are totally eliminating tester’s role. Even if the system is fully covered up with automation suites, you still need to perform some manual testing to identify bugs like UI issues which will not be fully covered in automation. Overall, automation is faster and cheaper than manual testing and it helps to ensure quality in a better way than manual testing does.

(Shiva Dasoju works as a Senior QA Engineer at [x]cube LABS. He has 3+ years of experience in Mobile, Web Application, Automation testing and is an ISTQB, SeeTest(Mobile Automation tool) certified tester.)