Today, companies deliver IT solutions at speed to remain competitive in the ever-evolving software industry. Just like them, you can also release high-quality IT products faster. Test automation makes it possible – it helps to ensure high software quality faster and meet customers’ requirements that change as quickly as the applications.
The World Quality Report 2021-22 reveals that IT heads automate between 15-20% of all tests. Continue reading this post to learn when companies apply automated testing, how it is helpful to keep up with the constantly-updating IT solutions, and which activities are vital to optimize test automation QA processes.
What Makes Test Automation A Great Choice
We live in a fast-paced world where hundreds of IT solutions are delivered on a regular basis. Companies introduce test automation to keep up with this rush when large-scale applications with several functions get tested regularly, during long-term projects with repeated changes, and when software is released often.
Companies begin by analyzing budget, business objectives, allocated time, and software to achieve desired outcomes within the test automation framework. This gives them a better chance to create an effective QA strategy keeping test automation in focus.
The results of the World Quality Report 2021-22 show that surveyed organizations with test automation as a vital part of their business strategies reaped a number of competitive advantages, including increased control and transparency of test activities, reduced quality assurance costs, and shortened test cycles among others. Considering the fact that user behavior changes frequently, companies look for strategies that allow updates and tests in the shortest possible time without impacting the quality.
3 Fundamental Test Automation Activities for Delivering Top-Quality IT Solutions
You can achieve the desired business outcomes following the right approach to perform test automation. When you keep test automation at the core, it gives you increased efficiency and builds QA processes.
Adjustment between Manual and Automated Testing
Automating all the tests is not always effective. For instance, multiple aspects of user experience (UX) design need to be manually tested by QA engineers to help them understand how website registration is easy for end-users. In this case, test automation is useless since the main point to focus on is product usability rather than speed.
However, there are a few tests that should be automated to speed up the testing process, such as:
- Repetitive tests performed on each build or release like regression, smoke, functional, etc.
- Tests using the same script and dynamic data for each run like data-driven tests
- Time-taking tests
- Tests on different types of configurations like various web browsers or operating systems
The State of Testing Report 2021 shows that organizations automate regression and functional testing (75%), stress and load testing (43%), and unit testing (43%). So, companies must implement test automation with good judgment and complement it with manual testing to maintain software quality.
Selection of the Appropriate Test Automation Tool
While creating a solid test automation process, companies focus on a number of factors, which also include choosing the appropriate automation tools. Once they have a clear plan for a project with defined business objectives, companies focus on choosing the test automation tool. While choosing the tool, analyze the following critical components:
- Budget – Find out beforehand how much the tool will cost.
- Project Requirements – Understand the requirements list and the issues QA engineers need to fix.
- Platforms – Find out whether the tool runs only on a particular platform or supports multiple platforms like databases, web and mobile applications, and browsers.
- Programming Languages – Ensure that the tool supports the programming languages that the QA team uses and matches the development stack.
If you have a powerful QA team, design its test automation framework and build a tailored tool to optimize the QA processes.
Polish of DevOps Processes with Test Automation
The result of the State of DevOps Report 2021 shows that nearly 42% of companies automate tests within DevOps, which helps them mitigate QA risks, decrease downtime, and facilitate the pace of changes. There is a great need for continuous testing as DevOps favors ongoing development and integration. However, it is time-consuming, so it cannot dispense with test automation.
Test automation helps accelerate QA processes, enhance project flexibility, and reap additional benefits within DevOps practices, such as:
- Better speed with no impact on quality
- More reliability through detailed test automation coverage
- Increased user satisfaction through constant software updates depending on their feedback
In DevOps, a well-designed test automation framework helps with fixing issues at the early stages of software development, which results in delivering quality IT solutions to the market.
Bottom Line
Like everything in the IT world, software development and user behavior constantly change. Companies have found test automation to deal with these global changes and meet the dynamic changes in IT solutions. Test automation not only helps maintain business development, but it also accelerates time to market and decreases QA costs. To achieve maximum benefits, companies introduce core test automation activities for optimizing QA processes, keep manual and automated testing balanced, pick the appropriate testing tools, and build DevOps
