There is always scope for improvement in the business world. Enterprises are constantly searching for ways to boost levels of performance and gain an edge over the competition. Many organizations around the world are embracing automation as a crucial strategy to stay ahead in the run.
Now, ‘Automation’ is a buzz word and is mainly focused on simplifying human activities, boosting the efficiency of employees, and helping to reduce operational costs. Time being a limited resource, automation is extremely useful in saving it as well as improving efficiency.
Organizations are striving to reduce manual work and focus more on automating processes. For example, in a few regions, Amazon has implemented delivery drones that have the ability to pick-up the orders and sort them using robots. Similarly, Google is testing self-driving cars, and Starbucks is testing cashier-free stores.
With so many critical processes being handed over to bots, organizations that develop automation software need to ensure their software is functioning correctly. To do this, they should have tests in place. Testing is an important part of software development to guarantee quality. While testing is essential to deliver a strong product, organizations do not pay much attention to testing.
Just as it is necessary to have tests in place, how we run these tests also matters. Testing can be of two types – manual testing and automated testing. Some organizations prefer to do manual testing. It is carried out by executing predefined test cases. Manual tests are repetitive, prone to errors, and cannot be executed on multiple platforms. The next approach should be automating the testing, which helps in increasing overall software development efficiency and helps to build more robust tools. Initial setup of automated testing can take a lot of time and effort, but once tests are automated, they can be reused. Automated tests can be executed faster than manual tests. They are less error-prone and less labor-intensive.
Automated Software Testing is used to test software with the help of software tools or automation codes. It involves the use of software tools that use the computing power of machines to surpass the physical and mental limitations of people, to test other software. It is the practice of running tests on software to improve the quality and remove errors automatically and can be used to control the execution of tests, compare their outcomes, managing test data, and using the outcome to improve software quality. Test automation is a quality assurance measure. It can also be referred to as test automation, automated testing, testing automation, or automated software testing tool.
Automated testing is used for simplifying test execution, increasing the speed of executing tests, increasing the amount of test coverage, improving the reliability of tests, shortening software development life cycle, minimizing human interaction with testing, reducing maintenance cost of testing, and more.
Benefits of Automated Testing
Now, we know the importance of software testing. But fast-paced environments for software development can create time and cost constraints that make it difficult to test software thoroughly before release. If defects fall undetected into the production environment, the effect can be consumer dissatisfaction and increased maintenance costs. Test automation enables organizations to conduct more tests in less time, maximize coverage, and free human testers to perform more high-level, exploratory tests.
Increase speed, efficiency, and quality while reducing the cost of testing
In the software development process, the main objective is to satisfy customers with timely launches of software that works faultlessly. Test automation makes it possible to execute test cases during off-peak hours and distribute them in various physical or virtual servers. Automated tests are performed within a fraction of time compared to manual testing. They give faster feedback on the quality of the software and its suitability for release.
Improve tester motivation and effectiveness
Manual testing can be monotonous, error-prone, and tiresome. Frequent repetition of the same test cases with only minor changes in data values is laborious and time-consuming. Test automation helps testers to reduce their frustration and it also increases the accuracy of tests. Automation in testing enables testers to focus on challenging tasks like risk analysis and exploratory testing.
Improves the test coverage
Automated testing can enhance the scope of tests to improve software quality. It is possible to run long tests unattended that are usually avoided during manual testing. Tests can run on multiple computers with different configurations. Automated software testing can look inside software or application and see memory content, data tables, file content, and internal programming to decide whether the product is behaving as expected. Test automation can perform several complex test cases during every test run that is impossible in manual testing.
