What’s the Benefit of Automation in Testing and Should We Do It?
Why Automation in Testing?
Every program development team tests its products, yet delivered applications always has defects. Test engineers strive to catch them before the product is released however they always creep in and they frequently reappear, even with the very best manual testing procedures. Test Automation software is the perfect method to raise the efficacy, efficiency and protection of your software testing.
Manual software testing is done by a human sitting in front of a PC carefully going through program screens, trying various input and usage combinations, comparing the results to the expected behavior and recording their observations. Manual tests are repeated often during development cycles because of source code changes and other scenarios like multiple operating environments and hardware configurations.
An automated testing tool may playback pre-recorded and predefined activities, compare the results to the expected behaviour and document the success or failure of those manual tests to a test engineer. Once automated tests are made they can easily be repeated and they may be extended to do jobs impossible with manual testing. As a result of this, savvy managers have discovered that automated software testing is a vital part of successful development projects.
Automated software testing has been considered critical for large software development associations but is often thought to be too costly or difficult for smaller companies to implement. SmartBear’s Tools are cheap enough for single programmer shops and yet powerful enough that our client list includes some of the greatest and most respected businesses in the world.
Automated in Testing Saves Time and Money
Software tests need to be repeated often during evolution cycles to guarantee quality. Every time source code has been modified software tests should be replicated. For every release of the software it might be examined on all supported operating systems and hardware configurations.
Manually repeating these tests is expensive and time consuming. Once created, automated tests can be run over and over again at no extra cost and they are much faster than manual evaluations. Automated software testing can reduce the time to conduct repetitive tests from times. A time savings that translates directly into cost savings.
Vastly Increases Your Test Coverage
Automated software testing can increase the depth and range of tests to help enhance software quality. Lengthy tests which are often avoided during manual testing can be run unattended. They can even be run on multiple computers with different configurations.
Automated software testing may look inside an application and see memory contents, information tables, document contents, and internal application states to determine if the item is behaving as expected. Test automation can easily execute thousands of distinct complicated test cases during every test run providing coverage that is impossible with manual evaluations.
The most conscientious tester is likely to make mistakes during dull manual testing. Automated tests perform the same steps precisely whenever they are executed and never forget to record comprehensive outcomes. Testers freed from repetitive manual tests have more time to make new automated software tests and deal with complex Capabilities
Automation Can What Manual Testing Cannot
The largest software and QA branches can’t execute a controlled web application test with thousands of consumers. Automated testing can simulate tens, hundreds or thousands of virtual users interacting with a system, applications and web applications.
Shared automated tests can be used by developers to capture problems quickly before sending to QA. Tests can operate automatically if source code changes have been checked in and inform the team or the developer if they fail. Characteristics such as these save programmers time and raise their confidence.
This is hard to quantify but we’ve experienced it firsthand. Executing repetitive tasks with automatic software testing provides your team time to invest on more challenging and satisfying jobs.
