Are you struggling to show Test Automation ROI benefits for your business? Are you looking for strategies to improve effectiveness of Test automation & ROI? Are you trying to improve the ROI in software testing in general and test automation in particular? With the growing complexity of software applications and the demand to release high quality software at speed (quality at speed), test automation is quickly attaining higher significance in SDLCs (software development life cycles). The list of benefits that test automation brings are manyfold. Automation testing tools not only increase productivity but also relieve the QA team from extra burden of repetitive and tedious testing activities. But for this, a well-planned test automation strategy must be followed to achieve greater success and ROI with test automation.
“Functional test automation is quickly becoming a business imperative for most projects irrespective of its size and complexity. The risks of releasing a software product without sufficient testing, have far greater implications now than ever before due to the highly competitive nature of market and growing expectations of end users. Software test automation, when done right, can mitigate these risks.”
CTO – Fortune 100 Company
Tips to Improve Test Automation Effectiveness & ROI
Done right, software test automation can quickly and efficiently return multiples of the amount of time, effort and cost invested. However, not every test automation projects deliver higher ROI and success. Setting the right kind of expectations with project stakeholders and business owners is important to help ensure that everyone has the same vision of success.
If you are struggling to make the most of your test automation investments or trying to enhance test automation effectiveness, here are 5 tips that you should start following to increase ROI:
1) Understand the Value of Automated Testing
Automated software testing can vastly reduce overhead, increase efficiency, decrease the time spent on testing by test engineers, critically increase the overall speed of testing activities (as compared to when parallel manual tests are carried out across a large combination of test machines), and most importantly decrease the margin of error that can creep in due to manual human-testing. Automated testing has other advantageous factors, such as:
– Automated tests, when implemented in early stages of the SDLC, helps in maximizing efficiency of development time.
– Once setup and running, test automation means less human interaction and thus saves hours of precious testing time.
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– Testing scripts that are written efficiently are reusable and can be customized to test different areas of the application.
– Test automation allows parallel execution and offers wider test coverage.
2) Decide What to Automate
Identifying what needs to be automated should be the very first thing you must do to leverage the benefits of test automation. Hence, considering different factors such as the application under test (AUT), the software environment, hardware and network dependencies etc should help you while deciding what to automate. Here is a list of few good candidates for test automation:
– Test cases that are highly repetitive in nature
– Features or functions that are expected to remain unchanged during the application lifecycle
– Test cases that involve complex data crunching and complicated calculations
– User actions that periodically require environment setups
– Non-functional tests (e.g. Security testing, Performance benchmarking etc) that are difficult to test manually
– Tests related to areas of the application that are more prone to defects/errors
3) Do NOT Try to Automate Everything
This should be a “no-brainer”, but trying to automate each and everything often defeats the whole purpose of doing test automation and negatively affect ROI. Since there can be practically millions of combinations of test scenarios in a product, automating each and every test case will result in increased costs and efforts. Similarly for certain complex test scenarios, it is better to use manual human testing as automation may not yield the desired result.
4) Create Automated Tests that Require Minimum Maintenance
While writing automated tests for applications that often get changed in terms of functionality and UI can be challenging. The automated test scripts may no longer work for the successive builds / versions of the application. To prevent this, your test scripts should have “self-healing” properties and you can achieve that by identifying and locating properties and UI objects while writing test scripts.
Additionally, you should use unique names and identifiers for various UI controls. This will help ensure that the automated tests remain unaffected by UI change. This will make your automated tests work smoothly without needing you to update it every time there is a new build with changed UI layout or functionality.
5) Use Standardized Test Automation Tools, Frameworks & Test Techniques
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You can solve most of the test automation challenges by utilizing standardized automation tools, frameworks and test techniques. The techniques recommended by various Software Testing Certification boards such as ISTQB, CAST, CSTE, ASTQB, CSQA etc. can be applied depending on your particular testing requirements. Also, by using the right type of test automation framework and tools can help in achieving the expected output and higher ROI from the test automation project.
Conclusion
Following these simple tips can help businesses in effectively improving test automation ROI and driving up success rates. The growing demand for delivering high quality applications faster — often termed as “Quality at Speed” — is pushing organizations to search for solutions in Agile software development, continuous integration (CI), continuous development (CD) and DevOps methodologies.
Agile automation testing is a critical part of these software development aspects. CredibleSoft has emerged as a leading software test automation company that is well-equipped to handle any test automation projects, irrespective of the project’s complexity, technology-stack or size / duration. We have a solid track-record of providing cutting-edge test automation solutions to SMBs, Fortune 500 companies as well as Startups with their QA, testing and test automation needs.
If you are a business looking for some serious quality assurance testing and test automation services to be outsourced at the best possible budget, then use this form to request an estimation and we’ll prepare and share the same with you free of cost.
