Every business gearing to produce quality software or other similar products should implement tests. Testing is one of the integral components in product development to ensure quality and optimized returns. Despite its numerous competitive advantages, many newbie and mid-sized companies don’t pay as much attention to testing.
But here is the thing. Running tests is as important as other critical components of a business. And it does not stop there. It’s also imperative to learn and apply the proper ways of running tests.
Many businesses rely on manual operation, but it’s not the best strategy, especially with all its associated hassles. What you should do then is to automate the testing process, including those which are already running. As much as possible, minimize or do away with manual testing. After all, automated testing boosts the whole software development cycle efficiency while ensuring that the tools being generated are more robust.
Here are some of the unmissable benefits or advantages of automated test management or using a test management tool.
1. Speeds feedback cycle
Feedback for newly-developed elements or components can eat a lot of time without test automation. But you can bring faster validation for phases in product generation via a reduction in a feedback cycle with test automation. It also boosts the proponents’ efficiency because test automation helps them diagnose bugs and other issues early on during the development phase.
2. Saves more time
Validating newly-generated features no longer takes as much time when the proponents automate the testing process. It also improves coordination between product owners who rely on the test results, including other departments such as design and marketing, thus, harnessing efficient and harmonized teamwork. Therefore, these departments can accurately view what’s going on and review the logs of the automated tests.
3. Lessens business costs
Since fewer resources are allocated for testing the products when using an automated test environment, the proponents can save a lot, which can then be channeled to other critical functions and operations. The point we’re driving here is that the teams should not resort to manual or traditional testing. You’ll see a significant and clear difference during the whole cycle of the process.
But, do note that it takes a lot of time and resources to install a sustainable and automated testing environment. It’s also a given that you’ll have to purchase a test automation tool that can help you make the testing process and environment stable and efficient towards yielding accurate results.
4. Higher Test Coverage
There are limits on the volume of tests you can verify when using a manual approach. But you can have more time developing new tests and including them to your automated test suite when making use of this efficient approach. Therefore, automation leads to a higher quality application since more features are properly tested as it increases the test coverage of your product.
Software developers can also generate more in-depth tests via automation, resulting in a deeper understanding of complex use cases. Proponents don’t also have to look at the testing process every time since it runs on automation, even if it’s a lengthy test. But that is not possible when they make use of manual testing.
5. Reusability of Test Suite
It can be challenging and too technical to establish an automated test suite during the initial stage, especially for non-techy or new industries. But it’s effortless and straightforward to reuse tests for other projects and even other cases once the proponents have clearly defined their suite. They can also connect the automated test suite to another project, which is one of the best advantages. You now have a deeper understanding of continuous integration pipeline and other related tools, aside from installing an automated test suite. With that, it’s easier for you to establish an automated test for a new project since you can easily replicate the initial knowledge gained.
6. Faster time to market
With automated testing, proponents can continuously validate and test newly-generated features as shared earlier. Businesses can then deliver their products to the market faster since test automation reduces the testing cycle and the feedback.
7. Better insights
When some test fails, proponents can leverage automated testing since it provides more accurate and better insights than traditional or manual testing. Aside from giving them internal program states such as file contents, data tables, and memory contents, automated software testing also offers more in-depth insights into the application. With that, proponents can diagnose what exactly went wrong. In that way, they can implement the proper solutions to address arising issues and prevent further damage.
8. Improves accuracy
During manual testing, even the most experienced and talented testing engineers can commit mistakes. Errors can occur, especially when handling complicated or complex use cases. But since they produce precise results whenever proponents run them, automated tests can implement 100 percent accurate outputs or outcomes.
9. Offers more features
Automated testing provides more features that proponents cannot find in a manual testing suite. For example, they can determine how the applications perform by simulating thousands of virtual users collaborating with the web application. That’s not something that one can do when doing manual testing. Now, what’s in it for you? You’ll save a significant amount of time you can devote to other integral components of your business.
10. Less stress for the QA team
The Quality Assurance (QA) team can devote their time on duties aside from manual testing when they execute an automated testing strategy. Once the company removes manual testing repetitive processes, the QA engineers’ job description becomes more interesting. QA engineers can now further improve the current testing suite or expand its unique features, and these are opportunities that testing automation results to.
11. Determine your builds’ stability quickly
To identify the stability of the proponents’ build, the team can set up an automated test to test automation. One way to validate and assess stability is via smoke testing. But setting up databases with test data and other factors must be taken into consideration by the testing engineer since smoke testing requires manual input, making it a slow process. But test automation can also hasten smoke testing to prepare the right databases and generate smoke test results automatically. These results are enough to identify the build’s stability quickly.
12. Eliminate human mistakes
Humans can inevitably commit various mistakes when testing manually. That’s why it’s a good step to adopt an automated test, especially for complex cases, to prevent unwanted errors that can jeopardize the whole process. But again, mistakes don’t totally go away. However, the rate of committing them is way lower compared when using the manual approach. Now, that we’ve covered some of the expected benefits of automated testing, let’s explore various test automation kinds.
Standard types of Test Automation
When automating the testing setup, proponents can use various types of testing, which we will explore in the following paragraphs.
Unit Testing
What’s the smallest piece of code that proponents can logically isolate from the system? It’s referred to as a unit which is a function for most programming languages. A unit test must not correlate with a network, configuration file, and database or touch other codes. That means proponents should stub the interactions whenever these occur. It’s not about testing interactions but ensuring that correct logic is the ultimate goal for unit testing.
Functional Testing
Testing the function with all its integrations can come with many benefits that unit testing cannot offer since it focuses on isolated logic. So writing functional tests does not come with faking calls or stubbing. Functional testing acquires inputs, which it then turns into usable results. These results can be correlated to the expected outputs.
Regression Testing
How does the team know if the quality of an application has increased or decreased? Regression testing is the best means to know that. Let’s cite an example. With a particular code, an API endpoint can typically manage up to 2000 requests per minute. Regression tests will then be implemented whenever a feature is included in the product. The team can know if the API endpoint can still manage the same volume of requests or more through the regression tests.
Smoke testing
The QA engineer or team can diagnose if the deployed build is running smoothly or not with the help of a smoke test. In many cases, the test serves as a confirmation step before moving on to the next step. It can already determine the build’s stability though it can only manage a limited volume of tests. In other words, it functions as a safety measure before proceeding to test further.
Black Box Testing
Black box testing only considers the inputs and outputs, meaning the internal code structure does not matter. Therefore, the testing team should not be provided with any form of documentation or existing information about the application. After all, the objective is to determine the application’s usability when someone utilizes it for the first time.
There you have some of the unmissable benefits of automated test management using a standard test management tool.