Designing and creating new software and technologies is a way for businesses to stay ahead of the competition, but however well designed, there are bound to be issues that need resolving, finding these issues is carried out by automation testing. Think of it as a test to double-check that the software or product has been designed to do exactly what it needs to do. Any bugs, defects or flaws will be flagged and the code will be removed or improved to resolve the problem before the final product is launched.

Automation testing runs from test scripts created by automation developers, minimising the amount of manual labour required to carry out testing the software, the automated process aims to increase the productivity, speed and accuracy of product development as it reduces the instances of human errors, giving reliable and consistent results every time. This means higher quality, reduced bug-fixing costs, lesser effort, and higher productivity for teams.

Benefits of automation testing:

Saves time and money.

Let’s face it all businesses like to save money and time and automation testing is one way to do this. Testing applications is an ongoing process, each time the code is modified it must be tested across various configurations, differing user journeys and operations systems. Creating these tests manually would be an enormous testing effort and would come at a much higher price and as the application development expands so does the cost. Automation testing allows you to run tests repeatedly at no additional cost.

With manual testing you would be limited to running tests for only 8 hours a day, running automated tests mean they can run 24/7 equating to an extra 16 hours a day, which means faster delivery of functionalities and a quicker time to market! Automation is considered quite a costly setup but once you have done the calculations the initial set-up costs are greatly reduced compared to that of manual testing.

Test coverage increases.

Carrying out end-to-end testing on complex enterprise applications requires significantly larger teams and man hours. With test automation, especially no-code, testing applications of any size, end-to-end can be completed with a few clicks of a button in a matter of hours or minutes. Your team can then test more features across heterogeneous applications and configurations, meaning enhanced coverage and higher quality.

Expansive test coverage increases the probability of recognising any bugs early on in the development phase which can be resolved.

Improved accuracy.

We briefly touched on this in the introduction of this blog, the expertise of a manual tester will determine how thoroughly our application gets tested, automation testing removes any dependency on manual testing and delivers expected results every time without bias.

Helps achieve continuous testing

This is the uninterrupted running of automated tests to gain rapid feedback on any potential business risk associated with the application that is being tested, resulting in quicker feedback relating to a bug and reducing business risk or exposure.

Ultimately continuous testing forms an integral part of the DevOps process and allows teams to work cohesively. Automation testing means you can achieve continuous testing as it allows you to test applications super quickly. It lets you implement shift-left testing, making testing an early and prominent part of SDLC instead of a bottleneck at the end of the development process.

Reusability

With no-code automation testing, you do not need to write test cases or manually execute them when the codebase changes – saving hours of manual testing where scripts are created and run over and over again, the no-code solution will create the test scripts which can be reused and executed as required without additional efforts or costs. If the automation solution offers pre-built keywords, your efforts decrease furthermore.

Faster feedback 

Feedback is critical to all projects, automation testing provides instant feedback meaning faster bug-fixing time and less downtime. If your product is already on the market then you need to know you can make a fix as quickly as it is found ensuring there is no negative impact on customer experience or satisfaction.

With manual testing identifying the bug, fixing it and testing the new functionality take much longer and could potentially lead to a bad customer experience.

There are several different types of software that can be automated

  • Unit Testing
  • Functional Testing
  • Regression Testing
  • Black Box Testing
  • Integration Testing
  • Keyword Testing
  • Data driven Testing
  • Smoke Testings

But you should never rule out manual testing completely, when looking at the following you should not automate testing;

  • User experience testing
  • Installation and set up testing
  • If automation takes longer than manual testing
  • Exploratory testing
  • End-user usability testing
  • Applications which involve strategic thinking and development
  • Test cases that are non-repetitive

Want to know more about how we at JC Design can help your business? Please get in touch.