What Is Automation Testing, And How Can it be Beneficial in Software Testing?
Though every software development group performs final product testing before rolling it out in the market, errors, bugs, and defects often accompany the delivered software. Software test engineers strive hard to catch and resolve them before the final product is released, but somehow, the bugs creep in and often reappear even after the best manual testing process.
So, what’s the way out?
Automation Testing is the answer. It’s an awesome way to increase the effectiveness, efficiency, and coverage of your software testing.
This blog post talks about how automation testing proves to be useful along with the manual approach, its benefits, and how the intervention of the latest technologies is transforming the future of automation testing. So, without further delay, let’s get started.
Manual Testing v/s Automation Testing
The manual software testing process involves human intervention sitting in front of a laptop or PC, going through each application screen, trying various input and output combinations, matching the outcome with the expected results, and recording the observations. Such testing is often repeated when there is a change in the source code during the development process and other situations and scenarios like multiple operating environments and hardware configurations.
On the contrary, automation testing tools can play back pre-recorded and predefined actions on the source code, compare the results to the application's expected behaviors and thus report the achievement or failure of these manual tests to the concerned test engineers. Furthermore, once the testers create the automated tests, they can easily be repeated in a loop and can even be extended to perform tests that seem impossible with manual testing. Because of such multi-fold benefits it offers, automated software testing is one of the most viable options for managers working in leading software development companies for the success of a project.
Automated software testing is one of the most complex and essential parts for big software development organizations, but it often gets expensive for smaller companies to implement. Dark bears — A leading software development company houses a team of expert testers who have in-depth industry experience performing manual and automation tests for multiple projects and tools. So, if you are looking to get your project tested, you can hire software developers in the USA who hold experience in testing multiple software for different domains.
Why is automation Testing Necessary? How does it benefit the company?
Automation testing is the application of tools and technologies to test the software with an ultimate goal to reduce testing efforts and deliver software before market time and is highly affordable. As a result, automation testing services help to provide better quality software in less time and effort.
So, whenever you introduce automated tests in an organization, it is essential to invest time and effort. However, automation software testing doesn’t involve much financial commitment, at least when you start on a small scale. Generally, companies whose main product is not software and service-based fear investing in automation testing since they think results won’t be as expected. But that’s not the case.
How does automation software testing benefits the company?
1. Faster Feedback Cycle
If developers fail to avail software testing services, some newly developed features can take time. Automation testing services not only shorten the feedback cycle but also brings a boost invalidation for phases in product development.
Automation testing is useful for detecting bugs or problems in the early development phase, which increases team efficiency and productivity.
2. Team Saves Time
Bu automating the entire software testing process, the team will spend less time validating the new features. Furthermore, it improves your overall internal communication with supporting departments like marketing, product owners, designs who depend on the test results. These departments have the authority to check out the logbooks of the automated tests and identify what’s happening, correct the issues and boost the development cycle.
3. Reduced Business Expenses
When you implement automation testing, your software development company will benefit from cost and manpower savings spent endlessly testing a product. In addition, the idea to perform automation testing and not the manual ones create a significant impact since, over time, it would be entire complex projects and not just a few screens to validate.
Though installing and setting up automated testing invest some time and resources, proper testing would be conducted with the right tools. It helps you set up an appropriate environment for testing.
4. Higher Test Coverage
Manual testing isn’t a viable option for doing bulk testing. Instead, automation testing allows you to perform innumerable tests by writing new test and adding it to your suite. This, in turn, increases test coverage of your product, resulting in more features testing and a high-quality product.
Also, automated testing permits developers to pen down in-depth tests that can penetrate deep inside the complex use cases, whereas lengthy tests are often neglected in manual testing.
5. Reusability of Test Suite
Though in the beginning, building your automated test suite itself is a challenge. However, once you’ve made it, it’s very easy to reuse the tests for other project use cases too. The most significant advantage is that you can hook up another project to your automated test suite.
Since you’ve already learned to set up an automated test suite, it becomes easy to replicate the knowledge and set up your test automation for a new project.
6. Faster Time to Market
As said earlier, new project features and phase requires continuous testing and validation with test automation. This reduces the feedback and testing loop and allows companies to release products faster into the market.
7. Better Insights
Automated testing provides better insights as compared to manual ones. Automates software testing gives insights into the application and shows data tables, memory contents, files, and other program states. It helps developers identify what’s going wrong in the development part.
8. Improved Accuracy
The accuracy of automated testing is much more than manual testing, especially in complex use cases. The chances of fault occurrence are zero to negligible, and they produce the same results each time you run the tests.
9. Automated Testing Provides More Features
An automated test suite leverages much more features. For instance, it simulates hundreds and thousands of virtual users interacting with a web app to see how it behaves. It’s almost impossible to act such kind of behavior in manual testing.
10. Quickly Determine the Stability of Your Build
Automation testing only helps you identify your build stability, but smoke testing validates the stability. However, smoke testing is slower than automation testing and requires few manual inputs from test engineers, especially for setting up a given database test data.
Furthermore, test automation is used to automate smoke testing. All you need to do is write the script and run the test. The database is generated automatically to run the smoke tests to determine build stability.
The overall goal is to release the build as early as possible and automatically validate its stability.
11. Eliminate Human Error
Since manual testing requires human intervention, mistakes are bound to the app; therefore, especially when the scenarios are complex, it’s advisable to perform automated tests to avoid mistakes. Though errors may occur in automation tests, the rates or chances of mistakes are negligible while using the automation test suite.
Will automation testing put testers out of work?
A most frequently asked question is — Are testers easily replaced? Automation can make testers’ lives easy by taking the most repetitive and mundane tasks in an operative flow.
Yet, the most daunting task for testers is to adapt to the changing needs of new tools and processes. The commencement of automated operations such as RPA ( Robotic Processes Automation) and testing has reduced human dependencies and kept them away from risky situations. This gradually improves the tester’s work quality and inevitably pushes them to change.
Automation has required testing engineers to acquire new skills that expand their workability and adaptation to the future, as with any other industry. Top-of-the-game testers are already focusing on learning new toolsets, relieving themselves of too much maintenance. The mantra is now, ‘less maintenance, more innovation.’
AI changing the future of Automation testing — Know How!
The Bottom Line
If you fail to implement an automated test suite in place, your organization should consider investing in a test automation platform that meets your product’s needs.
By automating the entire testing process, your organization will not only save time and money but also deliver high-quality products. Of course, one should perform manual tests, but automation testing should be a priority. Nowadays, an automated test suite can even simulate hundreds of virtual users interacting with your application. This would never be possible with manual testing.
Finally, human error is normal. Let’s try to eliminate it by investing in test automation!
