6 Reasons Why Automation Testing is Essential for Software
Ensuring the quality of the software product is industries’ top priority. Yet every 4 out of 10 software products have issues and defects. QA team is vigilant while detecting the errors before the product release, but they cannot guarantee that the issues will never occur. You may have the best test engineers in the team, but with manual testing, errors may persist. The best way to improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and test coverage of software testing is by adopting automation testing together with manual testing.
In manual testing, the testers carefully scan through every screen to try various usage and input combinations, compare the outcome with the expected actions, and record the observations. Automated testing tools can help the test engineers by playing the pre-recorded and predefined actions, comparing the outcome with the expected actions, and highlighting the failed and successful cases. Testers conduct manual testing during the development phase, and for every code change, the testers have to move back and forth within the development phase for fixing the codes. In automation testing, the test cases are created and repeated. The tasks, which are hard, time-consuming, and often impossible to perform, can be executed using automated testing tools. Hence, automated testing becomes an irreplaceable aspect of any software development project.
Let us see why software automation testing is absolutely essential for software development projects.
1. Software must perform consistently — One of the focus areas of adopting software automation testing is to ensure that the software performance is consistent under any given conditions. The adverse situations like, the temperature outside or any of the factors that impact humans, the machines will keep working consistently and provide you the expected consistent results irrespective of day of the week.
2. Software must be exactly what it is — Software is built on a logical structure that allows developers to understand the intention of building the software. The developers have the responsibility to understand the reason for building the software and see observe the way it is supposed to function. Since most enterprise software today contains a varied set of options, the chances that a particular combination of options might work contrary to intentions is high. Automation testing validates the software based on the options and variety of sets to ensure that the intention of building the software is met.
3. Software will keep evolving — Reflect on how many software that you use requires regular updates. And with every new update, you will notice at least one new feature. Until a user uses an application or software and highlights what is missing, the software developers will never have clear ideas about whether it requires new features and upgrades. It means that software will keep evolving. Since the use is vague initially, the request to improve the software will always be there. Technology and innovation create competition, and the developers must comply with regulations. It leads to adapting to changes and evolving eventually. Automation testing helps in testing the software during its regular updates so that the performance remains unchanged.
4. Software is fragile — The software is fragile, and as new features and options are added it can break the flow of existing features and options. No matter how delicately you handle the new updates it might unintentionally “break” an “option-set” while bringing in some new capabilities. Software automation testing becomes essential to ensure that the new features do not disrupt the performance flow when introduced and combined with the existing options.
5. Software must be cost-efficient — Manual testing of new features and options can be expensive. The implemented test automation framework is a one-time investment, which can be cost-efficient in the long run. Software automation testing allows the testing of new features without an extra cost and provides the most accurate results.
6. Software must be efficient and quick — Automation testing improves the software efficiency and speed. Manual testers spend hours testing the software. Sometimes they have to move back and forth to fix the software errors. If the error still persists, they will need to repeat the action. It neither improves the accuracy, efficiency, and time of the software. Automation testing removes the complexities and offers better test coverage with greater efficiency and speed.
Conclusion
Considering all these attributes, it is important that automated testing must exist with exploratory testing in your development lifecycle. The software requires testing immediately with designing, building, deploying or modifying. Software testing is evolving with new technologies and innovations. It will be impossible to hide software testing behind the shadows of the software development process. Software testing must be a parallel practice to the software development process. Since the pattern of software testing is repetitive because of the frequent changes in the software development process, the only option to reduce the drudgery of the repetitive tasks is to adopt automation in the software testing practice, which the enterprises are taking a massive interest in.