Every business with a product in development has to have testing set up. Testing is essential to making a product, primarily to ensure it's good. Despite its importance for providing a quality product, testing often receives insufficient resources from smaller and medium-sized businesses. Just as tests are essential, it's also important to know how they are run.

Even though it's not the most efficient method, several businesses still rely on manual testing. After testing, automation is the next step. Manual testing should be kept to a minimum at all costs. As a result, test automation improves product development productivity and paves the way for more robust tooling.

The top 12 benefits of test automation are discussed in detail in this comprehensive guide.

1) Test Automation = Faster Development and Delivery

In product development, fixing defects is one of the highest costs that isn't taken into account. The time and effort required to resolve a defect in code increases when there is a significant lag between its development and discovery.

Automating tests comes into play here. To ensure that the code is functioning as expected, it is essential to establish a more robust feedback loop between the two processes. When test automation is prepared to run as soon as code is complete, what used to take developers days to change because they had to relearn their code written months ago can now be done in minutes.

One of the numerous benefits of automated testing is a lower total cost of quality problems. Think about how much it would cost if testing slowed down development and you missed out on potential market prospects. The possible cost of not acting in this way might be fatal to a business.

To quantify the benefits of test automation on delivery times, it is possible to compare the amount of time it took to deliver before and after implementing such systems. Time spent on defect discovery, prioritization, and resolution by developers, product managers, customer service representatives, testers, and anybody else is included in the total before test automation is developed.

Then, after using test automation, re-evaluate the outcomes. Multiply the total hours worked by a fair hourly rate considering benefits (often 40% or more of income).

The return on investment (ROI) will be calculated by dividing the net profit (the value we just discovered) by the initial investment. You have a profit if the result is more significant than 1, and any other outcome would result in a loss of money.

We help companies realize the full potential of test automation. We provide customized test automation services to meet the unique requirements of your project.

To find out more about the services we offer, check out our Test Automation page.

2) Optimization of Accuracy and Speed

Automated testing is faster than manual testing once the tests have been documented. Manual testing requires more time, especially for larger systems, if it is to be executed often and thoroughly. Automating tests is a powerful tool for maximizing productivity throughout the testing phase.

This way, the testing team can be strategically positioned to handle the complex, case-specific tests. In contrast, the tedious, time-consuming tests that are common to all products can be conducted by automation tools. Because automated tests follow the same procedure each time they are run and generate comprehensive data, they help ensure greater consistency and precision.

As a result, not only can you save time, money, and resources, but you can also make a substantial profit.

3) Find More Regressions

It is common for regressions to happen more often after test automation has been added. The critical difference is that nowadays, regressions can usually be detected immediately and rectified quite simply. Therefore, they aren't always reported. In a continuous integration (CI) environment, a developer may notice a failed test, identify it, and correct it without documenting it. So, it may require a bit more work to count the regressions that are discovered.

Count how many regressions before and after test automation was put in place, and give each one a value. Averages are good to know. Calculating the benefit from test automation is as simple as comparing the average cost per regression fixed before automation with the number of regressions fixed after automation. The goal is for the average time it takes to fix a bug to go down over time and for the number of regressions to increase over time.

Finding more regressions can cost you more now, but this is a big difference from how much it used to cost users to find them.

4) Reusability of Test Suite

It's not easy to get started with your automated test suite. However, reusing tests for new use cases or even other projects is trivial once you have established your suite. One benefit is the simplicity with which a new project can be integrated into your automated testing environment.

You already have an in-depth familiarity with the processes and technologies involved in establishing an automated test suite, including a CI pipeline.

Therefore, you can quickly apply this knowledge to automate the testing of a new project.

5) Real-Time Feed-Back

Immediate feedback is another advantage of automated testing. When tests are run quickly, developers receive test results immediately, allowing them to respond rapidly to potential failures. Don't bother trying to crack the code from three weeks ago.

Access to real-time feedback is extremely valuable once your software has been released to the public. Manual testing will slow down the fixing of errors, which is especially important if time is of the essence.

In contrast, automated testing will speed up the time it takes to release new versions of your program. Automated testing, as a result, results in a more responsive workforce, an improved user experience, and pleased customers.

6) Increased Testing Coverage

To boost software quality, automated testing can run more extensive and comprehensive tests. Multiple computers of varying specifications can execute lengthy testing. By probing its memory, data tables, files, and internal program states, automated software testing can determine whether or not a program is functioning as planned.

Automated software testing makes it feasible to perform hundreds of complicated test cases in a single test run, ensuring coverage that can't be achieved with manual testing. When manual testing is reduced, software testers have more time to focus on more difficult features and develop innovative automated testing methods.

7) A More Testable Product

People who are committed to using test automation throughout the product development process naturally produce more testable products.

An organization can use either a qualitative or quantitative approach to define the advantages. Ask test automation engineers with a lot of experience if your product is easy to test. They will be able to answer quickly.

How long does it take your product to write a test for a feature? Can provide you with some numbers to work with. When this time goes down over long periods, you're making progress toward testability. When a product is easier to test, you can get it to market faster, test it in more ways, and miss fewer use cases. Stakeholders and product owners prefer more testable products because they increase trust in their capabilities.

Teams usually get better test and code coverage by adding test automation to their testing efforts, making the product more testable in the long run.

8) Less Stress on The QA Team

Consider adopting an automated testing technique to save time and allow your quality assurance staff to focus on other projects. Once the routine of manual testing is taken out of a QA engineer's work, new challenges and opportunities present themselves.

Many QA engineers see testing automation as a chance to develop new tools for improving and expanding the existing testing suite.

9) Saves Money And Time

Application testing goes on all the time. Every time you change a code, you must test it on different configurations, operating systems, and user paths. Testing all the possibilities by hand takes a lot of time and money. Automation testing is more cost-effective than manual testing, despite popular opinion to the contrary. Manual testing can't be used to do a series of tests automatically. On the contrary, testing your application manually will cost more as time goes on. Automated testing, on the other hand, saves money in the long run because, once built, test scripts can be used over and over again at no extra cost.

Automated tests can be run 24/7, while manual tests can only run for 8 hours daily. This means that automated tests can be run for an extra 16 hours a day. This means that features will be delivered more quickly, and the product will reach the market sooner. In most cases, the high initial setup and implementation cost is the primary worry when teams consider automating. It's true that the first time you use automation, it could cost you a lot, but it will pay off quickly. As the number of applications grows, so do the costs and work involved. You don't have to pay extra to run tests repeatedly with test automation. Also, it goes faster.

Don't forget that the return on investment for automated testing is directly related to how much testing is done automatically. The return on investment increases the more automated test cases you build and use. But keep in mind that testing must be done by hand in some situations.

To learn the differences between manual and automation testing, you can also read our article: Manual Testing vs. Automation Testing - What is the difference?

10) Earlier Defect Detection

By recording software errors in a database, automation testing makes the lives of testers a lot simpler. The development and support teams can more easily discuss the issues and devise solutions.

Incorporating these improvements into the project's development process accelerates progress without sacrificing quality or correctness in any key areas. The earlier a problem is discovered, the faster and more cheaply it can be fixed and used.

11) High App Quality and Performance

Automatic testing will guarantee your app is of the highest quality and performs optimally because of the comprehensive nature of the tests it runs. With this tool, you can run hundreds of automated test cases at once, making it simple to check your app on various operating systems and mobile gadgets. Choose cloud-based device farms if you wish to maximize test parallelism and concurrency. They will assist you in covering all necessary OS and hardware configuration variations.

Automated testing makes it easy to quickly generate simple and sophisticated, lengthy, and time-consuming test cases. If you decide to test your app manually, you will never be able to accomplish this.

12) Determine the Stability of Your Build Quickly

Automating tests is a great way to determine how reliable your build is, and test automation can help you do it. Smoke testing is often used to prove that something is stable, and a testing engineer's time and effort are required for smoke testing tasks, including creating test databases.

In addition, test automation allows smoke testing to be automated. Databases required for running smoke tests can be automatically generated. So you can quickly figure out how stable the build is.

In short, the objective is to be able to deploy builds as quickly as feasible and check their stability automatically.

To Sum Up

The promise of test automation stems from the benefits it brings to every participant. Brand awareness, sales, and loyalty are all boosted, and a more significant percentage of current customers are kept. The company can expand into new areas and cement its position as a market leader due to increased spending on product development and process innovation.

This will lead to long-term solutions to the problems the company is now experiencing and ultimately elevate industry standards. Quality assurance must be prioritized by top executives and integrated into the company's overall strategy. Employees must be given thorough instruction and explanations of the importance of quality assurance and the benefits of test automation.

Automated testing has been shown to immediately contribute to higher productivity and profit maximization through its proven ability to reduce costs, save time and effort, provide faster feedback, ensure consistency, and yield results more quickly.

Contact us now if you're interested in finding out more about how Ronwell can improve and simplify testing throughout the whole development lifecycle.

References

Techmagic - Benefits of Test Automation

Lambdatest - Benefits of Test Automation

Testrigtechnologies - Benefits of Test Automation

Testim - Test Automation Benefits

Top 12 Benefits of Test Automation