The benefits of test automation are numerous, particularly the ability to produce quality applications faster with lower risk. Despite this, many organisations still endure a largely manual testing strategy since they have not yet determined the best way to automate tests in the development process.

Test automation ensures the testing cycles conclude in a faster and more consistent manner, with fewer user mistakes and interruptions along the way. 

In this day and age, when tech and AI evolutions are happening continuously, it becomes redundant to perform repetitive tasks manually. Why not use the extra time saved (from automating your testing) to better focus your attention on matters that require a human touch? For example, exploratory testing and interpersonal activities (such as building business relationships and extending your client base) while your automation testing runs continuously in the background?   

What is Test Automation?

Test automation is a testing process that involves using automated software testing tools to execute a test case suite with predefined actions on a software application. The automation testing solution will compare expected and actual outcomes and produce detailed test reports so testers and developers can quickly diagnose any failures in the cycle.

Benefits of Test Automation

With a clear idea of test automation and its purpose, we can now review some of the key benefits of its implementation. 

1. Faster bug discovery

Finding bugs later in the development process comes at a high cost, so why not catch and fix them as early as possible?  Because test automation is so repeatable, testers and developers can recognize defects early through continuous testing of new and existing features, saving time and budget. Continuous test automation will quickly record functional regressions across the areas for which test coverage exists.

Testers can then spend a much greater percentage of their time using the application for real, as a user and quickly observing any useability issues or edge case bugs. They are free to really explore the application which is always the best way of finding niche bugs.

2. More efficient testing across multiple platforms

Using automated testing tools allows for the testing of multiple platforms and versions of your software, concurrently. This option is particularly useful if you have a web app for desktop and mobile, a mobile app and APIs that all require testing continuously.

3. Reduces human testing fatigue and error

The automated software testing process allows your team to focus more of their attention on exploratory testing to find the most damaging edge case bugs. Use your automation to take care of repetitive, tedious and time consuming test activity. Improve your team’s morale and keep them focussed and motivated, undertaking effective manual testing underpinned by solid automation.

4. More effective manual testing

As we established earlier, a solid test automation strategy provides testers with more time to test software edge cases that the automation is not designed to look for. 

Focused and targeted manual exploratory testing is a process that makes use of your team’s more intuitive and improvisational or heuristic skills and leaves the more monotonous testing tasks to the test automation framework.

Manual testing is therefore performed only when required and to supplement the automated testing.

5. Provides fastest feedback to developers

Automated testing is helpful at every stage of the development process, constantly providing quality feedback and highlighting functional software regression. Fastest feedback means quickest recording of bugs, fixing by developers and retesting to closure by testers.

This enhances communication between Product Owners, Developers, and Testers and permits the fastest rectification of bugs before they ever get near to a production environment. 

6. Improve product speed-to-market

Test automation dramatically helps reduce an application's time-to-market by assessing quality quickly, predictably and repeatedly. Once automated, the test suite execution is quicker and runs more consistently than multiple cycles of slow manual testing.

As a result, organisations see lower risk from increased numbers of releases to production whilst getting your features to market and keeping your customers happy.

7. Improves testing scalability

Scaling manual testing can be a lengthy, laborious and expensive process, requiring more people and extra hours to be assigned to the project. The more test cases there are, the more people you will need. Scaling your test effort is significantly more straightforward when you have high levels of automated to manual testing coverage.

8. Offers consistency and Improvement in test management approach

Automated testing and reporting helps testers keep track of changes made by others, understanding which tests have already been run, and which bugs have been recorded and resolved and what’s left to execute.

9. Encourages test reusability

It's always wise to look for ways to reuse common aspects of any business process. Test automation is no different and with a common project and shared test automation code touching on multiple application workflows, numerous Developers and Testers can make effective shared use of helper functions and common parts of a user journey like a customer registration for example. Once developed for 1 test, they can be reused by all and do not need to be constructed every time.

10. Increase test coverage

Using automated test suites can quickly enhance your overall levels of test coverage. Automated testing tools can execute tests against many user platforms with large numbers of functional scenarios to help optimise your product for a wider range of customers with far reaching useability.

Tests can be re-run with multiple data permutations and on different browsers, devices and operating systems, yielding a massive return on your test automation investment and significantly increasing your quality coverage.

11. Maximise return on testing effort

Automated tests can be run repeatedly in any environment with minimal extra cost. They aid in recording bugs at the earliest stages and help to focus your test team on more meaningful, heuristic, real human testing. A strategy that combines these 2 phases of testing always drives the best return for your testing practice.

Conclusion

As test automation technology progresses, so do the test tooling requirements of developers and testers who aim to create more and more reliable products. We can confirm with certainty that test automation is very much the present and the future of software quality assurance and is here to stay. Establishing your tooling and your team’s continuous testing workflow is critical to agile testing success.