Every software company needs testing. This allows you to make sure that the application works as intended. However, it's not only the fact that testing is part of your development process that matters, but also the way you test. Although manual testing has several advantages, it cannot provide good coverage of the application with tests. This article explains why test automation is essential when you want to build a robust application. See 10 reasons!
1. Significant increase in testing speed
Test automation allows you to significantly speed up testing. Work that took hours for manual testers can be done several times faster. Moreover, in the case of automated tests, you do not have the risk of human error, when due to a routine task and fatigue, an engineer can omit some kind of bug.
Test automation also allows you to speed up the feedback cycle. The sooner you get information about bugs and failures, the sooner you can pass it on to developers and fix existing problems. Moreover, by introducing automation, you make testing an integral part of the entire development process, and not just the final phases. This allows you to identify and resolve issues in the application earlier and release the product in the highest possible quality.
2. Reduction in business expenses
Saving money comes from saving man-hours. The saved time can be spent on types of manual testing that are impossible or impractical to automate. However, in any case, automation allows you to bring the release time much closer.
3. High percentage of test coverage
If you practice only manual testing, then you know perfectly its limitations. The number of test cases directly depends on how many manual testers you have. However, even if you have a whole team of testers, manual testing alone cannot cover all use cases for an application. Automation, in turn, allows you to increase the test coverage for your product and check how the application works in different combinations of OS, browsers, and firmware. In addition, automation helps testers to write and run highly detailed test scripts that test complex use cases. Long test execution is often omitted from manual testing, and automation makes it possible to run long test suites without human intervention for many hours if needed.
4. Saving team time
Everyone knows that test automation frees up the time of manual testers. Indeed, thanks to automated tests, the team spends much less time testing new functionality. However, automation saves time in another aspect as well.
Test results become available and can be shared through the communication tools the team uses like Jira, Slack, e-mail, etc. Thus, the whole picture becomes clear to the developers and they can fix not only the specific bug found, but also eliminate the root cause so that such an error does not happen again. Test results with visual diagrams and dashboards can be shared with management, the product owner, and other stakeholders. People even without a background in testing will be able to understand how the application is ready for release in terms of quality.
5. Fast release
Automation speeds up feedback from developers and all stakeholders. It allows your company to bring a product to market faster than if it were to rely on manual testing alone. In turn, a quick release gives an advantage over competitors and allows you not to lose your audience.
6. Deep analytics
Test automation provides deeper analytics than manual testing. Based on the results of the tests, you not only receive general information about the success and failures but also information on the internal state of the program, data tables, data on recurring errors, video records, and screenshots of the tests. All of this helps developers to fix problems as quickly as possible.
7. Reusing a test suite
A test suite creation is time-consuming, but it pays off. In the future, you can reuse it for other use cases or projects. Once you have an understanding of setting up an automated test suite and all related tools, such as continuous integration (CI) pipeline, you can easily replicate that data when setting up test automation for a new project in the future.
8. Low chance of human error
No matter how scrupulous a manual test engineer is, he can still make a mistake due to such a banal reason as fatigue. Test automation minimizes the risks of human error. The only time this is possible is when writing a test script. At the same time, the rank of such errors is much lower.
9. Quick application stability check
Smoke testing is often used to validate stability. When such testing is done manually, it is time-consuming, because a test engineer must set up a database with test data.
At the same time, smoke tests can be automated. You can automatically generate and prepare databases and quickly determine the stability of an application.
10. More test features
Test automation can simulate thousands of virtual user interactions with your application. So you can see how the application behaves in different conditions. Manual testing does not allow this to be simulated. Thus, using test automation you get not only a high percentage of coverage and time savings but also insurance against possible problems that may occur with high traffic on the application or with any non-standard request.
Cheat sheet: which tests are better to automate
In short, you need to automate those tests that are repeated, and also require routine actions from engineers. And this is a detailed list of tests that are suitable for automation:
- Smoke tests, sanity tests, regression tests.
- Data-driven and boundary tests. These tests use the same workflow, but different inputs for each test run.
- Tests whose goal is to collect a lot of information during the run, such as SQL queries and low-level application attributes.
- Stress and load tests which are used to test the performance of an application.
- Tests that take a long time to complete.
- Tests that involve inputting a large amount of data.
- Tests to be run against numerous configurations, various operating systems, and browser combinations.
- Tests in which you need to collect artefacts that demonstrate that the application behaves as expected.
How to ease the transition to test automation
Test automation has many benefits, but its implementation is not a one-day task. In addition to this, the many tools used in the process of writing scripts, running tests, and creating reports also introduce certain difficulties.
Zebrunner is a test automation management tool that helps make work with automated tests as simple and convenient as possible. Zebrunner not only allows you to run automated tests, get test feedback 10x faster, and fix bugs immediately, but also makes the entire test automation process as transparent as possible and provides all stakeholders with high-quality reporting.
Zebrunner integrates with all the tools you need for test automation. Thus, all information is collected and systematized in one place. You can run tests on emulators, simulators, and real devices. AI/ML technology automatically determines the category of failures and allows you to eliminate the root causes of errors. The Zebrunner support team is hosting a free demo for all teams interested in the product. This way you will learn about its capabilities and be able to use it as efficiently as possible for the needs of your project.
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