Why Do We Need Test Automation ?

Why Automated Testing?

In today´s fast moving world, it is a challenge for any company to continuously maintain and improve the quality and efficiency of software systems development. In many software projects, testing is neglected because of time or cost constraints. This leads to a lack of product quality, followed by customer dissatisfaction and ultimately to increased overall quality costs.

Every software development group tests its products, yet delivered software always has defects. Test engineers strive to catch them before the product is released but they always creep in and they often reappear, even with the best manual testing processes. Automated software testing is the best way to increase the effectiveness, efficiency and coverage of your software testing.

Manual software testing is performed by a human sitting in front of a computer carefully going through application screens, trying various usage and input combinations, comparing the results to the expected behavior and recording their observations. Manual tests are repeated often during development cycles for source code changes and other situations like multiple operating environments and hardware configurations. An automated testing tool is able to playback pre-recorded and predefined actions, compare the results to the expected behavior and report the success or failure of these manual tests to a test engineer. Once automated tests are created they can easily be repeated and they can be extended to perform tasks impossible with manual testing. Because of this, savvy managers have found that automated software testing is an essential component of successful development projects.

Automated software testing has long been considered critical for big software development organizations.

Advance a Tester´s Motivation and Efficiency

Manual testing can be mundane, error-prone and therefore become exasperating. Test automation alleviates testers' frustrations and allows the test execution without user interaction while guaranteeing repeatability and accuracy. Instead testers can now concentrate on more difficult test scenarios.

What makes automated testing so important to these successful companies?

i)  Automated Software Testing Saves Time and Money
Software tests have to be repeated often during development cycles to ensure quality. Every time source code is modified software tests should be repeated. For each release of the software it may be tested on all supported operating systems and hardware configurations. Manually repeating these tests is costly and time consuming. Once created, automated tests can be run over and over again at no additional cost and they are much faster than manual tests. Automated software testing can reduce the time to run repetitive tests from days to hours. A time savings that translates directly into cost savings.  

ii)  Testing Improves Accuracy

Even the most conscientious tester will make mistakes during monotonous manual testing. Automated tests perform the same steps precisely every time they are executed and never forget to record detailed results.

iii)  Increase Test Coverage
Automated software testing can increase the depth and scope of tests to help improve software quality. Lengthy tests that are often avoided during manual testing can be run unattended. They can even be run on multiple computers with different configurations. Automated software testing can look inside an application and see memory contents, data tables, file contents, and internal program states to determine if the product is behaving as expected. Automated software tests can easily execute thousands of different complex test cases during every test run providing coverage that is impossible with manual tests. Testers freed from repetitive manual tests have more time to create new automated software tests and deal with complex features.

iv)  Automation Does What Manual Testing Cannot
Even the largest software departments cannot perform a controlled web application test with thousands of users. Automated testing can simulate tens, hundreds or thousands of virtual users interacting with network or web software and applications.

v)  Automated QA Testing Helps Developers and Testers
Shared automated tests can be used by developers to catch problems quickly before sending to QA. Tests can run automatically whenever source code changes are checked in and notify the team or the developer if they fail. Features like these save developers time and increase their confidence.

vi) Team Morale Improves
This is hard to measure but we have experienced it first hand, automated software testing can improve team morale. Automating repetitive tasks with automated software testing gives your team time to spend on more challenging and rewarding projects. Team members improve their skill sets and confidence and, in turn, pass those gains on to their organization.

The Major benefits of automated testing are :

Fast - : Automated tests are significantly faster than manual tests performed by human users.

Reliable -: Automated tests perform precisely the same operations each time they are run, eliminating human error inherent in manual tests.    

  

Repeatable -: You can test how your application or Web site reacts after repeated performance of the same operations.

Programmable - : You can program sophisticated tests that test a wide variety of complicated but important scenarios and find problems or defects not easily identifiable by regular manual testing.

Comprehensive -: You can build a set of tests that cover all the features in your application or Web site.

Reusable -: You can reuse automated tests on different versions of an application or Web site, even if the user interface or internal application APIs change.

Here is the conclusion:
Automation testing is the best way to accomplish most of the testing goals and effective use of resources and time. But you should be cautious before choosing the automation tool. Be sure to have skilled staff before deciding to automate your testing work. Otherwise your tool will remain on the shelf giving you no ROI. Handing over the expensive automation tools to unskilled staff will lead to frustration. Before purchasing the automation tools make sure that tool is a best fit to your requirements. You cannot have the tool that will 100% match with your requirements. So find out the limitations of the tool that is best match with your requirements and then use manual testing techniques to overcome those testing tool limitations. Open source tool is also a good option to start with automation.