How Automation in Software Testing Can Benefit the Performance of Your QA Team?

Software testing is a crucial part of the software development process, primarily to ensure quality because it is almost impossible to eliminate the possibility of bugs. This is why every quality assurance (QA) team needs to have tests in place to identify all possible defects in the ability and meet the desired quality. 

However, defects and bugs might still creep into your application, even with the best manual testing practices. The better option is to employ software testing automation for software checks. This article explores some benefits of automation in software testing and how it can benefit the performance of your QA team. 

Benefits of Automated Software Testing to the QA team

Having a clear understanding of what test automation is can greatly benefit individuals and organizations involved in software development and testing, as it allows them to identify which testing tasks can be automated, to develop effective test automation strategies, to select appropriate testing tools and frameworks, and to implement automation in a way that improves testing efficiency, accuracy, and reliability. 

Software testing automation is the use of automated testing tools and frameworks to test for bugs and errors within the application. Adopting automated testing helps the quality assurance team increase the overall software development efficiency and allows more sophisticated applications to be built.

Here are some benefits of automated software testing to the QA team

1. Supersedes Manual Testing Capability

Manual testing involves sifting through the application screens and performing random trials of the application functionalities while comparing the results with the expected outcomes.

This is repeated over and over until the quality assurance team gets a clear idea about the quality of the software. Conducting these tests repetitively can become tiresome to the testers, and they become susceptible to mistakes over time. 

Even worse, in the case of bulky applications, the quality assurance team may become overwhelmed by the number of application tests they need to perform to get conclusive results. Test automation offers enhanced testing capabilities by increasing workflow speed, allowing them to conduct more in-depth tests faster.

2. Cost-saving Advantages

To ensure a bug-free and high quality, software testing must be performed repeatedly at all stages of the development cycle. The QA team must also perform software tests each time the developer changes the code.

Manually performing these tests multiple times can be expensive for the company and stressful for the QA team. On the other hand, automated testing is cheaper because the test scripts are reusable without extra costs.; the tester only needs to write it once.

Even though the initial costs of establishing test automation may be somewhat expensive, it offers cost-saving advantages in the long run. 

Automation in software testing can also help QA teams to save money by assisting them in identifying and resolving bugs earlier in the production process.

The IBM System Science Institute reports that the costs of fixing defaults in application increases as production progresses. For instance, a bug discovered during the maintenance stage is 100 times more than one discovered during the design stage. The earlier you find them, the better for the QA team.

3. Higher Test Coverage

Test coverage describes the extent to which the test cases cover the software application. While software testing aims to review all parts of the application, it may be difficult for the testers to get optimal test coverage.

Automating the software testing process can help the QA team to increase the scope and depth of the testing and subsequently help them to achieve a higher test coverage. This will help identify all potential issues and increase confidence in the quality of the software.

4. Faster Time to Market

Automating software testing saves time and promotes faster development and delivery, reducing market time. The automation tool can complete the tests rapidly and repeatedly around the clock. It won’t take weeks to rerun the tests – just a few hours might be enough to perform a comprehensive test.

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5. Improved Productivity

Adopting an automation tool can boost the productivity and morale of the QA team by helping them to complete more tests with lesser effort. The tests require minimal human intervention, and you can also integrate them into the development process for continuous testing.

This will allow the testers to spend less time on testing and more time on other critical tasks. Also, automated tests provide consistent results every time, reducing the need for manual re-testing. 

6. Suitable for CI/CD and DevOps

Automated testing is essential for continuous delivery and DevOps practices. Using the continuous integration/delivery pipelines requires the developers to continuously test that the new code changes do not break any existing functionalities or introduce new bugs into the system.

This may become challenging to achieve as the code, and the number of test cases become more complex. With an automation tool, you can easily keep track of the test cases and monitor the code changes and the result of the code change.

Conclusion

Automating software testing can be valuable to QA teams looking to streamline their development processes and take advantage of the latest development methodologies. It will save time and money and help them achieve higher accuracy in their software testing.

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