Test automation is the hottest software Testing trend of 2019. It has become the key enabler of many advanced development and deployment practices. For instance, the adoption of Automated Testing has become critical for companies that decide to implement Agile and DevOps methodologies. So, let’s discover the major benefits of automated testing and why automation in software testing matters.

1. Saved Costs

Contrary to the popular myth, automated testing is more cost-effective than manual. Manual testing doesn’t allow you to run repetitive tests. In fact, the cost of testing your application manually rises as time goes. By contrast, automated testing is cheaper in the long-term perspective, because once you’ve created your test scripts, you can reuse them 24/7 without any additional cost. True, the initial adoption of automaton may be somewhat expensive, but it will pay off quickly.

You have to keep in mind that the size of automated testing ROI depends on the level of automation adoption. The more automated test cases you generate and use, the higher the return on investment. But don’t forget that there are cases when manual testing is essential too.

2. Fast Development and Delivery

Test automation will help you save your time. Automated tests are completed rapidly and can be run repeatedly. In other words, you don’t have to wait for weeks to execute the tests all over again – just a few hours will be enough.

Thanks to fast test execution and the repeatable nature of tests, automated testing increases the speed of development. Here are some of the advantages you get by speeding up the testing process with automation:

• A shorter software development cycle
• Frequent releases
• Quicker changes and updates to the app
• Faster time-to-market delivery

As you can see, switching from manual testing to automation will reduce the waiting time and boost your development.

3. Increased Productivity

Automated tests don’t require any human intervention while running, meaning that you can test your app at nighttime and harvest the results the next morning. Because automated tests can run repeatedly on their own, software developers and QAs are able to spend less time on testing. Basically, with automation, your engineers can focus on critical tasks. Everyone knows that fixing the existing app functionality is not as exciting as creating new features.

4. More Accurate Tests

With test automation, you are more likely to have error-free releases. Thanks to minimized human intervention, automated testing is more accurate than testing applications manually. The thing is, a human tester can make mistakes during any step of evaluation. But the machine won’t. Generated test cases are more precise than human testers, which means that by eliminating human errors, you will reduce the risk of failure.

If you want to unleash the full potential of test automation accuracy, try working with an AI Testbot. It’s an artificial intelligence-powered solution that can perform exploratory testing even better than humans.

5. High App Quality and Performance

Thanks to the extensive test coverage, automated testing will ensure your app’s high quality and performance. It allows you to run thousands of automated test cases simultaneously, so you can easily test your app against multiple platforms, on several devices at a time. And if you want to make the most out of test parallelism and concurrency, go for cloud-based device farms. They can help you cover all the required variants of OS and hardware configurations.

What’s more, with automated testing, you can create many test cases quickly, including the complex and the lengthy ones. This is something you can never do if you choose to test your app manually.

6. Immediate Feedback

Another benefit of automated testing is instant feedback. With fast test execution, developers get testing reports instantly, so whenever a failure occurs, they will react to it quickly. Forget about struggling to decipher the code written three weeks ago.

Immediate feedback is especially useful when your application is already on the market. If you need to fix some bugs quickly, manual testing will only slow the process down. By contrast, test automation will help you make quick updates to your application. As a result, automated testing brings high team responsiveness, better user experience and higher customer satisfaction.

7. CI/CD and DevOps Implementation

You can’t ignore test automation if you think about implementing the Continuous Delivery and DevOps practices, because automated testing is the key to both of them. In the CI/CD pipeline, every developer’s commit to the source code has to be tested, and there’s no way of doing it quickly and efficiently except for test automation. So, having adopted automated testing, you will find switching to Continuous Testing and Delivery easy.

Too bad, you may have trouble orchestrating test automation across the CI/CD pipeline. It just gets hard to manage when the complexity of code and the number of test cases grow. The good news is that you can use AI-powered solutions that will assist you with ‘smart’ testing orchestration. Moreover, AI can help you overcome test automation bottlenecks and enhance the benefits of automated testing.

Wrapping Up

All in all, test automation is inevitable if you plan to streamline the workflow and take advantage of the latest development methodologies. The fact is, the benefits of automated testing will only grow in the future because each year, more effective tools emerge and testing frameworks become more mature. The new areas that automated testing has been conquering recently include:

• Model-based testing
• Predictive analysis
• Robotics automation
• API test-case automation

So, if you don’t want to be left out of technology evolution, go on and implement test automation now. It will speed up the development and delivery, ease the introduction of CI/CD, increase test efficiency, accuracy and productivity. And the best part is that you’ll get all these perks without compromising on the app’s quality or performance.

If you want to maximize the benefits of automated testing, use a reliable app testing solution, pair it with your existing CI/CD tools and run automated concurrent tests efficiently on hundreds of real devices.

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