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Test Automation Benefits
For any software team trying to make a case for establishing or improving software test automation within their organization, one of the most important areas to highlight to leadership is always an explanation of test automation benefits. Suppose you’re trying to learn more about these benefits or looking for help to make the case internally. In that case, this handy list of 10 ways your team can win with test automation is perfect for your needs.
1. Save time
At the heart of the matter, one of the top reasons for software test automation is that it saves a lot of time.
Your team will stop wasting all the time manually re-testing the same tests repeatedly by automating tests. Through this time savings, software test automation can allow your team to focus on other important work that can bring more value to your organization.
At testRigor, time savings is one of the appealing benefits of test automation for leadership teams looking to establish efficient processes that can scale as the team and organization grow.
2. Reduce costs
Directly related to the time savings that software test automation can help achieve is a cost reduction.
There is a ton of overhead built into manual software testing due to wasteful, repetitive work and a pace of manual work that can never match automation.
By cutting out this manual work, teams can achieve significant cost savings that provide another attractive benefit for leaders within an organization. Another major aspect is being able to identify and thus fix bugs earlier in the software development lifecycle – which in turn leads to time, cost, and potential reputation savings for the company.
Again, introducing cost savings early on in how you structure your software project can provide efficiencies that scale over time. For this reason, our team at testRigor strongly suggests starting as early as possible – regardless of the size of your organization. The longer you wait to introduce these efficiencies, the longer your organization will continue to pay for these unnecessary costs.
3. Reduce human error and inaccuracy
Manual software testing is always going to be prone to human error and inaccuracies, no matter how good the team is.
With test automation, repetitive tests run the same way every time to avoid the chance of a human performing a test inconsistently, which itself can lead to additional issues and wasted time trying to unravel improperly performed tests. Even if a human was to write a test the wrong way, it’s easy to detect and fix – since automated tests can run as frequently as desired with virtually no additional effort or cost.
Reducing human errors with automated tests means your team members can spend more time and attention on specialized tasks that they might otherwise need to rush through. Your team members will probably feel an improvement in the quality of their work, and this often improves morale in our experience.
4. Rapid refinement
As alluded to above, because automated test suites can run as frequently as you want without putting a large tax on your systems or budget, you can collect feedback on your product at an extremely fast pace.
Every time your automated tests run, you’re basically collecting QA feedback across your entire software project. This QA feedback is invaluable in informing your team about the state of your product from a quality perspective.
Issues that may have gone undetected without precisely planned and scheduled manual testing instead become detected rapidly as they’re introduced into the project. This means a faster time to find and fix issues that affect customers and end-users. Quickly identifying issues as they’re introduced into the software project also makes them easier to fix, because they’re fresh in the minds of the team that worked on the update. Issues that go undetected for a long time mean the people tasked with fixing the issue likely haven’t thought about it for a long time, and may need to spend a lot of time looking through the project code and systems to properly understand and address it.
At testRigor, this is one of the most meaningful improvements that we see for software teams that introduce automated testing. Most teams really care about the quality of the software project that they work on, and it can be a huge morale booster to find and fix issues before they start harming end-users and turning into complaints to customer support.
By reducing complaints to customer support due to undetected and unfixed issues, your team can also reduce cost and morale issues elsewhere in the organization.
5. Speed time to market
Another appealing benefit of software test automation for leaders at any organization is improved speed to market, which usually means bringing more money in faster.
This benefit is highly valuable not only for startups, where it is crucial to survival but also to enterprises. Every company wants to make sure new features, improvements, and fixes get into the market as quickly as possible to enjoy the benefits sooner than the competition can keep up.
Time to market is an essential strategic benefit that many leadership teams find valuable when considering investing in automated testing for their software project.
6. Improve test coverage
Manual test coverage has so many constraints due to the fact that so much work is restricted by how much each human team member has the capacity to contribute. It doesn’t scale well and is a huge cost as an organization grows, while also being a serious hindrance for smaller teams trying to increase their size.
Because manual testing resources often become a constraint in the ability to cover the product with tests, introducing automated tests can alleviate this bottleneck and improve test coverage by allowing your team to spend more time writing automated tests and less time manually performing tests.
Furthermore, there are some tests that simply will not be practical with manual testing, like testing features with a large scale of users or records that manual testers would not be able to frequently perform, if at all
7. Improve test reusability
If you’re like most software development teams out there, chances are your project is going to have enough consistency that the automated tests that you write can be used elsewhere within the project, or even for other software projects within your company that may share similarities.
Whereas manual software testing is mostly not reusable, automated tests can be re-applied elsewhere, often with little to no modification necessary.
8. Regularly see build health at a glance
Since automated test suites can be run every time to perform a build of your software project, you can actually keep your finger on the pulse of the build health of your project on a constant basis.
With automated tests, every time you run a build, you’re also checking the health of your build at the same time as the test suite runs. With manual tests, many teams limit manual testing to changes only, and simply don’t have time to cover every aspect of the build every time a build is performed.
9. Improve insights
When you detect an issue with manual testing, there is usually a whole process to investigate and capture related details, which sometimes requires action from several team members.
With automated tests, when an issue is detected, it can pretty much always be simultaneously documented with information about what context the issue occurred in and where it occurred. This information can include pointing you to data tables, locations in code, the contents of memory for the session, and further information about internal states within the system.
These improved insights from automated testing can help you more quickly identify and document the source and context of the issue, so that the team fixing the issue can reach a resolution much more quickly.
10. Improve team morale and lead them to more fulfilling work
Thanks to all of the benefits listed above, with automated testing, your software team can spend less time working on tedious, repetitive manual tasks and more time on more meaningful and fulfilling work.
This benefit isn’t limited to just the QA team – your software developers will also be happy spending less time researching issues and trying to chase them down long after they were introduced. Your customer support team will also likely have fewer issues to track and respond to, and time to resolution will likely be reduced.
All of these benefits mean your team will be happier and much more productive, thanks to the advantages introduced by automated testing in your software project. As we’ve already mentioned, you likely want to start as early as possible to begin realizing the efficiency gains and scalability benefits of automated testing. Get in touch with our team at testRigor, and we’ll help you get up to speed.
