17 Key Benefits Of Automation Testing For A Successful Release

With the increasing pace of technology, it becomes challenging for companies to manage the quality of their web applications. Due to the limited time window in Agile development and cost factors, testing often doesn't get the attention it deserves.

Lack of proper testing leads to a bad quality product, delayed delivery, unsatisfied customers, and an increase in costs. The reason behind such issues can be an unplanned test management strategy or a delay in development and underestimated the effort of creating a test case.

Test engineers may certainly try to catch bugs or errors before releasing the product, however, you can’t catch every bug. After deployment, a quick fix after your migration to production and then regression testing are the only solutions. Regression testing is very time-consuming but relevant to maintain product stability. In such scenarios, you will find yourself stuck in a vicious cycle where your deployment window will continue to grow narrower. How do we cope with such scenarios? The answer is automation testing.

In contrast to manual testing, automation testing is an effective way to improve the effectiveness and coverage of the testing process by speeding up execution cycles, relieving testers of repetitive tasks, reducing human efforts, and providing instant feedback.

In this article, we will discuss automation testing and why automation testing is the right call for your software pipeline.

What Is Automation Testing?

Automation testing is a process that involves an automated tool to execute test case suite and predefined actions on a software application. The testing tool takes actual outcomes and compares it with the expected result to generate detailed test reports.

Since test automation demands a considerable investment of resources and money, we should plan when to use automation, the scope of the automation, and best tool for automation. Good planning practices can save you from high costs.

Benefits Of Automation Testing

Now, that we are done with the introduction, it is time to look at the key benefits of automation testing to help you eradicate the ambiguity on whether automation testing is the right choice for your organization. Here we go!

1. Schedule Your Test Execution 24/7

One of the major benefits of automation testing over manual is the flexibility to execute testing at any time, from anywhere in the world. For performing manual testing, you would need to have a computer for testing a web application, but you can’t carry your computer or laptop everywhere. Also, if somebody asked you to perform a round of testing at 3:00 AM after a long day at work, you will not be in a very good mood.

This is why automation testing is better than manual testing, because in such scenarios you could schedule your test case execution to run at any hour of the day, remotely from any location, and analyze the test results by reports generated on the basis of your test suite execution.

2. Easy Regression Testing

Manual testing is time-consuming for every fix deployed in production, and testers have to repeat a set of similar test cases over the same period to ensure that the bug has been removed. Regression testing has been a pain point for every developer. Performing the same test over and over, not only takes more time but also brings down the overall efficiency of a tester.

Performing regression testing manually consumes a lot of time and leads to the following issues:

• Running the entire regression creates congestion in the release cycle making it inflexible.

• Manual regression testing cannot be thoroughly performed every time the software gets updated because of the time constraints.

• Uncertainty about whether tests are performed the same way every time.

This is why automation testing is an ideal way to perform regression testing. As discussed in the previous point, automation tests are like robots who never sleep. Therefore, the time window can be extended always to run the regression testing suite. Also, time invested in building an automated test case is a one-time effort, which brings us to our next major benefit of automation testing.

3. Reusability Always Make You Feel Better!

Another major benefit of automation testing the reusability of your test scripts. Writing effective test cases requires a lot of time and effort, and to write the same test cases again could leave one mentally exhausted. This is why automation testing is better than manual testing. When you perform automation testing, you write a test script one time and get to reuse it as many times as you like.

Let’s look at this point from a cross-browser testing point of view. As you perform cross-browser testing, you may need to write test scripts or test cases every time to test an application on different operating systems or devices. Sounds tiring, doesn’t it?

However, the automated test scripts are reusable; you don’t always need new scripts even if the OS version on the device gets changed. It is possible to redo the same test again without forgetting any steps.

With the automated testing tools, test scripts can be reused as many times as you need, ultimately saving both time and effort.

4. Powerful Test Reports To Help You Analyze Hundreds Of Test Cases With Ease

In the case of manual testing, testers have to report manually to know how many test scripts have been written and what bugs have been fixed. The whole process is cumbersome and leads to dependency on each other.

On the other hand, it is possible for test automation engineers to view what other engineers have worked on, what scripts have been written, what tests other testers have performed, and what bugs were discovered and fixed with the help of clear reports for automation testing.

LambdaTest offers an API for automation testing with Selenium to help you extract every inch of information related to automated test suite execution on LambdaTest, even without logging into our platform.

5. Ability To Perform Testing On Multiple Platforms In Parallel

While developing a website, it is essential to ensure cross-browser compatibility over various browsers, hardware, operating systems, networks, and mobile devices.

Performing browser compatibility testing requires the creation of countless test cases, especially considering the number of browsers versions available in the market. Performing manual testing over hundreds of browser + OS combinations may result in delaying the software release process.

However, automated testing allows testers to execute tests on thousands of browsers, operating systems, and devices quickly, and simultaneously.

6. It Saves You A Lot Of Time

Without a doubt, automation testing speeds up your test cycles, relieving you from testing the repeating, monotonous test cases on a daily basis and allowing you the time and efficiency to come up with better test case scenarios. Companies suffer huge losses due to the inability to deliver bug-free releases quickly. I am not saying automation testing will deliver a bug-free release but it definitely will save you enough time to ensure that your web product stays solid after every change deployed in production. Read our article to know what stops a tester from finding bugs.

7. Reduced Business Costs and Better Utilization Of Manpower

While the initial investment can be on the high side, companies save a lot of additional expenses with automation testing with effective resource utilization.

Once your automation test scripts are all set then you need only a few hands on deck to monitor those test case execution on a frequent basis and troubleshoot for any script failures. Test automation results in a higher quality of work, reducing the need for fixing glitches after the product is released. Therefore, a reduced business expense is one of the significant benefits of automation testing.

8. Shift-Left Testing Done Better!

Shift-left testing is a methodology which conveys that the testing phase should be incorporated into the SDLC(Software Development Life Cycle), right from the requirement gathering phase to find bugs at an early stage.

A benefit of automation testing is that it can be performed as soon as the development starts, thereby detecting the bugs or defects earlier, helping you to shift-left in a better and faster manner. Run automation tests on user stories to ensure that the story is clear and identifies validations and constraints every tester needs to understand. This approach may help you to detect and eliminate early bugs from your website.

9. Improving The Quality Of Manual Tests

While I have been preaching about why automation testing is better than manual testing, I am not implying that automation testing is all you need. Manual testing is important for coming up with unique test scenarios and test cases. Quality manual test cases will help you write quality automation test scripts. Automation testing helps ease the stressful activity of a manual tester, so they get enough time and bandwidth for coming up with better test scenarios. Manual testing serves as the base for automation testing: once you perform manual testing, you can cross-check the results with the help of test automation tools. Results generated from the automation test tools can help testers enhance the quality of test scripts written manually.

10. Maximize Test Coverage

Manual testing can help you create a quality test case, but when we talk about 100% test coverage for a complex web application, doing so manually can be very challenging. One of the key benefits of automation testing is that it can help you maximize your test coverage.

Automation testing tools can ease testing by analyzing the various components of the software, such as databases, web services, UI, and so on as per the business requirements. It will, in turn, improve overall test coverage of a web application.

11. Maximizing ROI

Manual testing takes a considerable amount of time to launch a software product to market due to repetitive testing.

However, automation testing can help reduce time-to-market and launch a bug-free product, by taking care of repetitive tasks with fewer resources on-board, maximizing financial returns for businesses.

12. Accelerate Cross Browser Testing

Manual cross-browser testing may lead to multiple challenges and problems. In the case of manual testing, testers first identify the browser their web application must support. After preparing a checklist of all the browsers, they execute a single test on different browser OS configurations to measure how well their web development efforts are weighing out. Achieving sufficient test coverage may look like a nightmare if you have a wide audience to attend. To prepare for every customer coming at your website from legacy to the latest browser, manual cross-browser testing may seem impossible.

13. Smoke Testing

Performing regular smoke testing can help you avoid outages and is recommended as a best practice. However, many corporations end up avoiding it as they feel that doing so will end up squeezing the tester’s bandwidth. This is why automation testing is considered so important. You create an automated test build based on your random smoke test scenarios and that is it. Now, you can easily perform smoke testing on a regular basis.

14. Data-Driven Testing

Data-driven testing is a key benefit of automation testing as it allows you to execute your test cases to validate those functionalities which can be triggered with the involvement of numerous sets of data.

15. Distributed Test Execution

Distributing test cases over multiple machines, OSs, or browsers is not feasible in the case of manual testing. Testers can perform only testing on any one platform or device at a time to detect the behavior of an application.

Automated testing tools allow distributed test execution by allowing various tests to run on different computers or devices at the same time.

16. Scalability

It is possible to scale manual testing with more people and hours allocated for a specific project. The more the test cases, the more hands you will need to scale it.

On the other hand, automation testing offers a high level of scalability as you only need to add more test executors to the testing platform or tool.

17. Complex and Lengthy Test Scenarios

The final key benefit of automation testing is to execute error-prone, complex, and lengthy test scenarios the right way, every day. There may be some test cases which may include dozens of reproducible steps. Such scenarios could lead to a faulty assurance by a mere distraction while testing manually. With automation testing, you only have to develop a robust test script once and you are good.

Conclusion

There could be more benefits of automation testing as the industry is progressing immensely around automation. However, the above-presented points are the most key benefits of automation testing in my opinion. What is yours? Feel free to share a way in which automation testing has benefited your test cycles.

Also, keep in mind that manual testing is always needed for better automated test cases. I would also want to highlight that in spite of all the benefits of automation testing, there is still a chance that you may fail in delivering your project on time. This could happen due to many factors but the most critical and common would be the wrong selection of your automation testing tool. Remember, automation testing is highly tool dependent and there are many vendors in the market to choose from. Make sure you pick the right one, and happy testing!