As the economic recession intensifies, organizations are becoming more and more focused on adopting technologies that can induce cost-effective processes for recession-proofing their business. For software companies, the challenge of delivering high-quality software products while saving costs in their processes has been more significant than ever now. In most scenarios, testing processes are significantly expensive, leading to businesses compromising on the tools and infrastructure they deploy in their organizations to cut down on costs. Additionally, several organizations have laid off multiple skilled employees across different departments to stay within budget amidst this economic downturn.
So how can organizations better address this economic recession?
Testing is an essential element in the entire process when it comes to ensuring good quality software, applications, and other digital products. In this pretext of an economic downswing, automating the QA or testing processes has proven to usher in cost-effective benefits for organizations, helping them address these economic limitations while ensuring high-quality software to end users.
QA automation or test automation crucially refers to the process of automating the testing procedure of software applications by leveraging automation tools.
Mostly, QA automation tools execute repetitive testing processes that help teams shift focus from performing repetitive tasks manually to emphasizing more on the complex and advanced test cases.
Automating QA processes significantly helps to improve continuous integration and delivery that involves developing, testing, and deploying crucial software tools regularly rather than in stages.
How does QA Automation testing work?
QA tests are primarily written in source code by the development teams; however, one can write them using keywords if they employ codeless testing tools.
Two primary ways for automating QA testing include:
Testing of the graphical user interface (GUI), which usually refers to quality assurance testing where the user experience is mimicked.
API testing that is leveraged to test the application programming interface (API) that lacks a GUI and needs to be checked at the message layer.
How can effective QA automation help recession-proof businesses?
Despite a significant initial investment for deploying a suitable automated testing environment, QA automation enables companies to cut down business expenses in the long run and costs comparatively less than several manual processes. This is primarily because once the required automation test scripts are prepared, teams are not required to monitor the test executions or troubleshoot in case of script failure. Therefore, test automation results in delivering the best quality apps with minimal need to fix glitches post the product release, thereby reducing the overall business expenses.
How can QA automation induce cost-effectiveness in app development projects?
- Reducing the overall regression testing cycle time
- Providing quicker feedback to development teams
- Testing for developed customization where crucial elements are required for delivery
- Accommodating the requirements into automated tests to reduce costly human errors
- Employing on-demand testing methodologies as required by the customizations
Additionally, a cloud-based environment or deploying a dedicated, existing on-premises automated testing environment enables to deliver QA feedback quickly, which helps to lower project overhead.
Leveraging correct tools, automation frameworks, and test environments helps optimize test cycle time, driving better brand growth and profits in the long run. As a result, organizations should focus on deploying suitable QA automation software for improved outcomes.
- Contributing to improving ROI
As repetitive testing consumes significant time to launch the product. QA automation helps simplify this by encouraging reusability and quicker validation. This helps to launch the product faster. Additionally, reducing the number of resources needed for QA testing helps capture greater ROI in businesses.
Primary stages of QA automation
Defining the scope of the project
This stage involves examining the goals of the testing process and performing a feasibility study. Questions like:
- Which tests can be automated
- Which ones need human intervention
- The required budget, human resources, and expertise
Selecting the right automation testing tool
The teams require a tool that caters to the company's needs, but the web app's technology induces the pick. There are several automation solutions to select from; hence, price, functionality, intuitiveness, and adaptability must be considered.
QA teams must be provided with suitable instructions on how to use tools to the fullest.
Please check: Choosing the right tools for automated mobile app testing
Creating a strategy
The QA team needs to design a suitable test strategy to efficiently outline the project's workflow, the final outcome, and a framework for running the test cases. The primary procedures, testing tools, and standards must be included in the framework.
Setting up the right environment
This involves setting up the right testing environment and optimizing test coverage across the different scenarios is essential. Additionally, the testing team should plan and track the hardware and software installation and the testbed script development operations.
Starting writing scripts
After setting up a suitable environment, QA engineers should build appropriate test scripts based on actual requirements and scripting standards. The scripts must preferably be reusable, organized, and understandable for third parties.
Also read: Writing Automated Test Scripts Using Selenium
Running the tests
GUI testing and API testing are the common approaches for automating QA testing that leverages suitable tools for simulating user experiences.
Analyzing and reporting
Automated programs offer reports once the tests are completed. The results reveal the flaws in the components or the defects and if the product requires further testing.
Key benefits of QA automation
QA automation enables organizations to increase the overall coverage of their testing processes. With automation, QA teams can run several automated test cases simultaneously and across multiple platforms and devices. Automation helps explore applications in-depth and evaluate the memory data, internal file structure, and data tables. This helps to enhance the quality and performance of the final software product. Automated regression testing additionally streamlines testing every app feature, which is cumbersome in manual testing.
Optimal resource utilization
Automated testing allows QA team members to apply their skills in advanced product testing. QA automation enables teams to execute functional and regression test cases with minimal or no human interference. QA test automation helps reduce the dependence on the presence of a large QA team to lower the time consumed and cost of hiring and training software testers.
QA automation helps companies to utilize experienced QA resources for creating better test cases and thereby helping to improve software quality.
Alignment with CI/CD and DevOps
In multiple scenarios, manual testing is complex to manage as the codes get more complicated or in case of an increase in the test cases. QA automation allows development organizations to switch to continuous improvement and delivery seamlessly.
Also check: A Complete Guide to Continuous Testing
Improved overall productivity
By reducing human intervention, automated testing helps development teams execute tests even late at night and obtain the findings on the following day. The automated processes minimize testing time and focus more on critical activities.
Quick feedback
QA automated testing provides immediate feedback; for instance, developers receive the testing reports instantly with fast test execution to react quickly when a problem occurs.
When the software product is launched in the market, immediate feedback helps to make further decisions regarding the software quality. Therefore, automated QA testing helps to improve team responsiveness, enhance user experiences, and greater customer satisfaction. Again, automation processes prove to be more affordable in the long run as there are no recurring costs for creating test scripts and thereby help drive ROI.
HeadSpin as a critical tool in QA automation
The data science-driven holistic testing platform, HeadSpin, helps execute end-to-end testing on real devices and capture critical performance and functional KPIs to deliver high-quality applications and flawless user experience. The platform supports more than 30 automation frameworks and performs tests in real-user scenarios.
HeadSpin's AI Testing and Dev-Ops Collaboration Platform helps companies to leverage secure real device infrastructure to perform end-to-end testing and monitoring with real devices across the globe and evaluate the actual user experiences with complete security and performance through HeadSpin's varied cloud deployment models.
Conclusion
QA automation offers critical insights into testing processes, helping to identify failures better and chalk out resolutions for improving the overall performance and functionalities of the application. Especially during an economic downturn, automation QA processes can prove to be a savior for businesses to address the challenges better while ensuring that they deliver top-notch software products to end consumers.
FAQs
Q1. What are the key QA automation tests?
Ans: Unit tests
Integration tests
Smoke Tests
Performance Tests
Regression tests
Keyword-driven testing
Q2. When is test automation most appropriate?
Ans: QA automation is essential when:
The test can be repeated
The tested feature doesn't alter its behavior frequently
the test is highly time-consuming
The test includes challenging calculations
The test needs to ensure that after a new change, the previous functionalities work correctly
Q3. What is continuous integration in QA automation?
Ans: Continuous integration refers to the technique leveraged for maintaining efficiency, and it helps improve app performance, reduces bugs, and saves significant time. In QA automation projects, continuous integration is essential when multiple engineers contribute to different branches of code to a single product.
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