Benefits of Test Automation in 2022

Testing is an integral part of every product development process. Every organization developing products should test their products before sending them to the market. When it comes to software, the key benefits of test automation are quality assurance, efficient performance, and the possibility of developing more robust tools. Neglecting testing means neglecting these essential advantages of automation testing that may increase your organization’s overall productivity and profits.

With testing, you should also understand how to run these tests. Even after such rapid technological advancements, some small and medium-sized companies still rely on manual testing. However, with easy and cost-effective use of technology, it is now available that organizations can take advantage of the benefits of test automation. Inclining your software towards automation testing is undoubtedly better than manual testing and can offer the benefits of increasing overall software development efficiency and allowing for more robust tools to be built. This article will comprehensively look at the advantages of automation testing, so stay tuned till the end!

Advantages of Automation Testing

We have filtered for you the most prominent benefits of automation testing. So, whether new to software testing or trying to pace it up, reading the advantages will help you a lot!

1. Quick Feedback Cycle

Feedback for recently developed features can be slow without test automation. Test automation enables you to shorten the feedback loop and expedite validation of product development phases. Another benefit of automation testing is that it boosts team productivity by enabling early problem or bug detection throughout the development phase.

2. Team up and save time 

Your team will save time testing recently built features by automating your testing process. Additionally, it enhances communication with other departments who rely on the findings of these tests, such as marketing, design, or product owners. These departments can quickly analyze what’s happening by looking at the automated test logs.

3. Cost-effective for business

As automation testing demands lesser resources than manual testing, an organization will be able to save the cost of additional resources while employing it. Of course, the company has to bid farewell to manual testing to take advantage of this automation testing benefit. It will consume your time and resources on the initial level; however, you may also install an appropriate testing tool that can help you create a stable test automation environment.

4. Increasing Test Coverage

The number of tests that you can manually verify is constrained. Thanks to automation, you can spend time creating new tests and including them in your automated test suite. As a result, more features are thoroughly evaluated for your product, leading to a higher-quality application. Additionally, automated testing benefits developers in creating deeper tests that examine intricate use cases. Therefore, with testing automation, it is possible to execute lengthy tests unsupervised, which are frequently avoided during manual testing.

5. Test Suite Reusability

Building your automated test suite can be challenging in the beginning. However, once your test suite has been defined, it is simple to reuse the tests for different use cases or even different projects. The reusing part is a significant advantage of automation testing.  You already have a solid understanding of how to set up a continuous integration (CI) pipeline, an automated test suite, and all relevant tools. Therefore, setting up your test automation for a new project is simple if you use this information.

6. Easy marketing

As mentioned above, test automation enables continuous testing and validation of newly built features. This shortens the feedback and testing process and allows businesses to launch their goods more quickly.

7. Greater Clarity

Unlike manual testing, automated testing offers more insightful analysis when certain tests fail. In addition to providing insights into the application, another benefit of automated software testing is that it also displays the contents of your memory, data tables, files, and other internal program states.

8. Better Accuracy

Manual testing stands for greater chances of errors and mishaps even if the best software engineer handles the task. The situation may become even more grave if there is a complex user case at work. Automated testing benefits your testing phase by making the process completely accurate as they will provide exact metrics every time you conduct the test.

9. Additional Features

An automated testing suite offers additional features such as the simulation of thousands of virtual users interacting with your application or website to comprehend the functionality of your web product. Manual testing can never achieve this kind of feature and functionality. Thus, using automation testing with these features can save a lot of time for developers.

10. Reduction of workload for the Q&A team

Taking advantage of automation testing will enable your Q&A team to spend more time on tasks other than manual testing. Apart from reducing the workload, automation testing can also enrich the experience of a quality analyst by offering them other avenues of testing besides manual testing. Many professional quality analysts find opportunities to create new testing tools or optimize the existing testing suite by adding new features.

11. Helps determine the level of stability of your build 

Another benefit of test automation is that it helps you determine the stability of your build as you run the test. Smoke testing is a go-to when it comes to validating stability. But, even this can be slow and demanding in terms of manual input from the testing personnel, such as preparing a database with test data. Moreover, you can use test automation to automate smoke testing. This will automatically plan and generate suitable databases to conduct smoke tests enabling you to determine the stability of your build quickly.

12. Secure from manual errors

Humans can make mistakes, and this is no exception in testing. Complex and pressurizing situations may give rise to more chances of errors. Thus, automating the process is a wise decision. Using test automation for web or app testing may not entirely eliminate errors but can definitely minimize such instances.

Read Also – Difference Between Unit Testing and Integration Testing

Types of Test Automation

With the above-given information, we hope that the benefits of test automation are clear. You can take advantage of automation testing by choosing among the several types of automation testing for your testing suite. Following are the options you can go for

1. Unit Testing

The smallest chunk of code that may isolate itself within a system is called a unit. That’s a function in most programming languages. A unit test shouldn’t interact with any other code or use the database, configuration file, or network. If such interactions are present in the function, stubbing these interactions is right (faking the interaction and returning data). The final objective is to determine whether the argument is sound. Not testing interactions is the goal.

2. Functional Testing

Functional testing seeks to evaluate the function with all its integrations, in contrast to unit testing, which concentrates on testing isolated functionality. So, whenever you’re writing functional tests, there cannot be any stubbing or faking calls. The benefit of test automation here is that, in essence, it transforms the input into output. This result is compared to what was anticipated.

3. Regression Testing

Regression testing is crucial for determining whether an application’s quality has declined (or increased). For instance, the code provided can process 1500 requests per minute for a specific API endpoint. Regression tests are done whenever a new feature is added to the product. The quality analyst engineer can use regression tests to determine whether the API endpoint can manage the same amount of requests or more.

4. Smoke Testing

A smoke test enables a QA engineer to assess the stability of the delivered build. This is frequently considered the confirming phase before moving on to other testing phases. Only a few tests are conducted during a smoke test to evaluate the build’s stability. Before continuing, it serves as a quick verification check.

5. Black Box Testing 

Black box testing disregards the internal organization of the code. Only the inputs and outputs matter in a black box test. A tester should not have any information about the application and should not attain any form of documentation. The objective is to determine how usable the application is when someone uses it for the first time. Black box testing can determine errors in the following categories:

• Incorrect or missing functions
• Interface errors
• Behavior or performance errors
• Startup and termination errors
• In short, black box testing is hard to automate but still an advantageous type of testing to include.

6. Integration Testing

When doing an integration test, a testing engineer seeks to determine whether two or more systems can coexist (integrate). From a dataset to an API, anything can be considered a system.

For instance, an integration tester aims to determine if the Tweet Deck tool continues to operate on top of the Twitter API. The integration test succeeds if both products work well together

Know the Difference Between White Box and Black Box Testing

Conclusion – Benefits of Test Automation

The benefits of testing automation and the availability of its several types can help you assess and enhance the quality of your builds. Of course, unit and functional tests are every build’s most common and essential automation testing. However, regression testing is also crucial to maintaining your product’s quality level.

Your company should seriously consider investing in a test automation platform that suits your needs if you don’t already have an automated test suite. Your business will save time and money and produce items of superior quality by automating the testing process.

Thus, going entirely for automation testing and minimizing manual testing can be advantageous for your software.