Organizations are becoming proactive in leveraging automation tools to ensure quality testing and high quality assurance of their software, combining them with smart and latest approaches to refine the process for better results. The need to balance out key factors like quality, delivery, and cost has urged firms to find better ways to align their product deliveries with reduced time-to-market, keeping up with the fast-paced digital age.
Businesses are frequently adopting new development methodologies to gain a competitive edge in the market. But most of the solutions are just a buzzword if they are not implemented correctly. Automated Software testing has emerged as a fantastic gizmo that helps improve accuracy and implement competitive features faster. An amalgamation of software development and automated software testing practices is helping businesses to move ahead as per schedules and achieve optimal business value.
Challenges with Manual Testing
Manual Testing can become tedious for organizations if they want to keep up with their goals of timely delivery in the market. Creating manual tests while maintaining and executing them is a difficult task especially at scale. The constant pressure of meeting the schedule and delivery timelines creates a stressful environment among manual testers, creating problems in getting accurate test results. Here, test automation can be considered as a key element to ensure a faster delivery approach to reduce GMT (got-to-market time).
A variety of test automation tools are available in the market, but it is critical to have complete knowledge about the software and the type of test automation framework it needs before deciding upon a testing tool. A potential test strategy needs to be flexible and dynamic to allow future updates and developments in the software. Implementing a smart testing strategy will ensure the proper management of testing tools, volumes of data, and test results as the application develops.
Test Automation: An Efficient Solution
A good test automation framework supports various factors including the scope of the technique, scalability of the approach, reusability limits, and essential metrics to measure the success rate of the automation process. The process should be efficient enough to cover all the aspects such as code analysis, usability of the features, also streamlining unit, functional, performance, regression, and stability tests.
Test automation also promotes effective decision-making by accelerating the process to gain quick feedback associated with the QA strategy. It ensures reduced human labor and time invested in the testing process, allowing testers to focus on the activities that need their attention, such as test design, test cases, exploratory testing, and plans for continuous improvement.
Using Automation Testing to Reduce Go-To-Market Time
As we know, manual testing is more time-consuming as it requires manual execution of test cases. In this case, the process needs a longer time period to complete and directly affects the scheduled delivery time of the application in the market. Longer time periods invested in manual testing result in repetition of the process until the expected quality is achieved. In several cases, the delivery time is highly affected in the long-run and many business opportunities are lost.
However, with test automation, we can reduce the amount of manual efforts, allowing testers to work on other problematic areas. Test automation offers tools and test cases that are executed meticulously to meet the desired quality standards. An effective strategy will quickly identify errors and some advanced systems also give suggestions to rectify those errors. Let’s explore more benefits offered by test automation to understand how it contributes to reduced GMT (go-to-market time).
- Faster Bug Identification
One of the most important features of automating QA testing is the increased coverage for issues and bug identification. Test automation makes it easy for testers to find latent issues hidden deep inside the core of the software that is difficult to find manually. Additionally, test automation also allows rewriting the code to stop the bugs as it is detected, reducing the chances of recurrence of the issue or bug that could go undetected in the testing cycles. These tests deliver clearer and faster feedback on bugs, crashes, hangs, and other flaws in the application which helps speed up the development process.
- Obtain Test Results Quickly
Test automation gives out results from a test suite much faster. These results can be generated 24×7 and are faster than the manual processes. It is important to figure out the actions these automated tests are going to perform to ensure productivity improvement. Repetitive tests running for multiple builds like regression tests, load testing, unit testing, and functional testing are time and resource-intensive. These processes can be executed in a better way after automation as the testers can get the results in a shorter span of time.
- Speed-up Regression Tests
The development process of software should always function properly, detecting, and eliminating the bugs in a well-integrated manner. Changes in the code in one part of the software should not affect the performance of the software adversely or cause harm to the original bass code fixed before the release. Maintaining an inventory of the works of applications, test scripts, and controls, and checking whether the new functions of the software or other changes are not breaking down the functionalities is crucial.
Here, automating the regression testing results in better ROI as the regression test suit just needs to be run after necessary modification. This process helps in reducing the time involved in testing By validating the changes faster against the baseline and checking the software properly for potential bugs and issues.
- Better Assessment of Application Quality
Automation of the queue testing helps the testers to assess the quality and stability of the software faster than manual testing. it provides a detailed account of test data including coverage information failures and success. This refined data provides traceability of the test assets and helps the team to analyze if the product is ready for delivery or it needs more QA testing. As test automation speeds-up the testing process, it reduces the GMT, manual intervention, faulty delivery, and unidentified bugs.
QA automation has become an integral part of the software development process, but at the same time it is important to know which tests should be automated and the ones that should remain manual. It is important to consider all the factors such as the complexity of the automation, frequency of execution of the test cases, and the efforts involved in automation. Maintaining the test automation suite will also help in scaling the product whenever required.
Lastly, testing the automation code for stability and dependability should also be considered. Most automation tools require appropriate programming abilities. However, using script-less test automation helps improve maintainability and ensures faster go-to-market time.
Bottomline
Automation testing is a holistic approach to better delivery and faster go-to-market time. With automation testing, organizations can enjoy faster release cycles, top-notch products, and reduced manual efforts, moving the business towards better opportunities.
Reduced time-to-market indicates better internal processes and an efficient software development approach. Employing QA techniques and a good testing strategy will ensure much faster delivery of the product to the market.
Scalable Solutions offers automated testing and QA services to help you through your test automation journey. Our skilled automation engineers provide quality automation services for both mobile and web applications, along with QA automation for SaaS. Our smart methodologies and QA testing strategies ensure streamlined automation testing and high-quality end-product.
