Find out if automating software testing is a wise investment for your organization.
The creation of the first 'code' is attributed to Tom Kilburn, who developed a calculation software in 1948 at the University of Manchester, England. From the beginning, bugs needed to be fixed. It wasn't until about twenty years later that the practice of pre-release testing really developed. The first tests were entirely manual and required a lot of time and effort.
With the evolution of technology and the increasing complexity of software, manual testing became more costly and inefficient. This led to the idea of automating certain aspects of testing, allowing for greater efficiency and precision.
Test automation significantly reduces the time and resources needed to verify software quality. It aims for broader test coverage, which is essential for identifying bugs and performance issues.
Moreover, in an Agile development environment, where delivery cycles are short and frequent, test automation is crucial for ensuring continuous product quality without slowing down the continuous integration chain.
Test automation requires significant initial investments: beyond automation software (increasingly open source and free), team training, the time they spend designing tests, and ensuring compliance with guidelines takes a lot of time.
While developing automated test scripts can be long and costly, the cost of maintaining them is even higher as you move from unit tests to more comprehensive tests (integration tests, end-to-end tests, acceptance tests, etc.). Indeed, comprehensive tests often face the explosion of combinatorial cases, and identifying test cases is a challenge in itself.
In the long term, test automation can significantly reduce software maintenance and operation costs. Automated tests are reusable and can be executed quickly with each code modification, allowing for earlier detection of regressions and reducing the risk of bugs in production.
Additionally, automation frees human testers from repetitive and time-consuming tasks, allowing them to focus on exploratory testing and overall product quality improvement.
Yes, but...
Although automation offers many advantages, it can sometimes become a hindrance if poorly implemented. For example, poorly designed test scripts can require significant maintenance efforts, negating productivity gains.
While creating unit tests is simple, comprehensive tests require expertise, particularly in breaking down test blocks that need to be combined based on the cases to be tested.
Moreover, automation is not always the ideal solution for all types of tests. Some tests, such as those involving complex user interactions, can be more effectively performed manually.
A combined approach, using both manual and automated tests, is often the best solution to ensure software quality.
Yes, but then...
Manual testing remains an essential complement to automated testing. It is particularly useful for exploratory testing and the most complex comprehensive tests.
To maximize the efficiency of manual testing, it is crucial to train testers and provide them with appropriate tools and testing environments.
Quadza Software can provide you with qualified testers at a cost 40% lower, allowing your teams to focus, among other things, on test automation.