With more and more organisations today using DevOps and Agile methodologies to deliver their software projects, there’s now a greater demand than ever for speed and efficiency. As a result, automated testing is becoming necessary for organisations who want to keep up with the pace of modern software delivery.

In fact, according to a recent study by NASSCOM, a quarter of their respondents have automated between 51% and 75% of their testing processes, demonstrating just how valuable this approach has become for many businesses.

But in addition to that need to just keep up with the rest, automated testing does also bring with it a vast number of benefits over more traditional, more time-consuming manual testing.

Most notably, automated testing allows products to be delivered far more quickly and efficiently, ultimately saving your business time and money.

Here, we’ll take a closer look at some of those other benefits and demonstrate why your organisation must embrace automated testing today and beyond.

1. Ease Concerns Over Quality Assurance

When it comes to enterprise IT and software development, quality assurance should be high on everyone’s priority list at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Consequently, testing is a crucial component of the SDLC if you want to achieve the necessary levels of quality. With that in mind, automation can be used to introduce more accuracy, regularity, and consistency into your testing processes to fundamentally increase the quality.

By putting automated tests in place, you can greatly reduce the risk of any bugs going unnoticed, something which can often happen with manual testing. Automation ensures bug-free product delivery and can take on a great deal of the responsibility for your project’s quality assurance.\

“Automation can save testing time by 50% to 90%.

By shortening the test cycle, you also shorten the delivery cycle (including 10% of overall R&D).”

2. Remove Human Error, Improve Accuracy

Similarly, manual test errors, and the possibility of human mistakes, will be greatly reduced when you shift over to an automated approach. Automated tests will follow the exact same process in the exact same way every single time.

While it’s wise to keep your qualified QA and software testing specialists working on the areas of your project which are of the highest importance or are under the most risk, automated tests will be advantageous elsewhere when used correctly. Look to automate tests which need to be run repeatedly, as this is where human error is most likely to creep in.

Of course, once they have been created, automated tests can then be run over and over again with no additional cost, providing a truly worthwhile return on investment.

“Human errors are the second most common cause of system failure. Automation can reduce up to 22% of incidents caused by human errors.“

3. Remove Human-Imposed Limitations

Automated testing is not bound by the limitations of human workers, such as office hours or the need for regular breaks, and this provides another enormous advantage for the efficiency of your project.

You can set automated tests to run based on a timer and run these test cases overnight outside of regular office hours to optimise product delivery, allowing you to accelerate the project and stick to challenging timelines. This has the potential to reduce the time spent on software testing from days to hours.

“Automated tests can be done 24/7, unlike 8 hours/day in manual testing. This results in faster development & delivery and a shorter time to market.”

4. Optimise the Use of Resources

In many cases, quality assurance is highly monotonous and repetitive when approached manually, but automation can remove these mundane tasks, saving testing engineers time and effort to be spent elsewhere.

Your test cases can be executed at a click of a button when automated, removing hours of manual work and allow your resources to focus on other areas, either with higher risk or greater importance. Those testing engineers can then utilise this extra time to bring in further innovation to the project and add greater value to the overall delivery.

“Reusability and modularity can reduce efforts by up to 25%. Overall testing efforts can be reduced up to 30-50%.”

5. Reduce the Need for Specialist Skills

Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems can be employed to achieve more intuitive levels of automation, which can further streamline the QA and testing phases. AI used to enhance automated testing can easily identify any advanced developments, such as UI changes or database updates.

Your automation can handle testing processes which are far more complex and would therefore require engineers with specialist skills if done manually. Removing the need to train existing employees or hire new ones is another excellent benefit, both in terms of saving time and removing significant costs.

“Integrating AI in test runs can help perform over 1000+ test cases in a single run.”

6. Achieve Greater Depth and Coverage

Automation can improve the depth of the testing you carry out, allowing thousands upon thousands of complex test cases to run at the push of a button, maximising the impact with just a fraction of the time and effort. The depth and coverage testing engineers can achieve from automated test cases is unparalleled when compared to a manual approach.

“Automating even half of the software testing efforts can accelerate testing cycles by up to 86% and detect bugs earlier by up to 67%.”

7. Reduce Feedback Cycles and Improve Insights

Not only will automated testing provide more depth and coverage, it will also provide much shorter cycles of feedback and results, allowing you to further accelerate delivery. Faster feedback also streamlines communication across all teams working on the project and improves overall efficiency.

In addition to this, the nature of the testing processes will return much more useful insights when bugs do arise, giving you a deeper look into what went wrong and how it can be avoided in future.

“Test Automation can improve test coverage by 70% and provide quicker transformative insights, enabling us to deliver quality at speed.”

8. Test Simultaneously Across Platforms and Devices

With mobile and cloud becoming such prevalent parts of enterprise IT, these automated test scenarios can also be executed to test product compatibility across different operating systems, platforms, and devices simultaneously.

There’s no need for manual testing to check the compatibility of the product across different systems, as automated tests can do this quickly and consistently, saving further time and effort.

“Latest test automation tools can perform backward and forward compatibility testing and version checking simultaneously and allows access to 1000s of browsers, devices and OS combinations.”

9. Test Against Challenging Scenarios

Automated tests can simulate almost any hypothetical scenario, allowing you to test against challenges, which simply could not be done with a traditional approach to QA. Your automated testing can allow you to test the software under the stress of thousands of users all at once, for example, which would be near-impossible if done manually. The more scenarios you test for, the lower the risk of failure once your software goes into production.

“With AI, tests can be simulated to include 1000s of virtual users to assess application stability, irrespective of the application type.”

10. Accelerate Time to Market

Put simply, automating processes makes things move faster, reducing project timelines and speeding up delivery, helping you stay within budget. When you introduce automated testing into your software delivery, you will invariably find your product or application being brought to market in less time thanks to the speed and efficiency gained in all the areas mentioned above.

Less time spent on the project means lower costs, resulting in valuable savings for your business and a greater return on investment.

“Automation tools have become at least 5 times faster than the previous decade and can reduce time to market up to 70%.”

Final Thoughts

Automated testing is both the present, and the future, of software testing and QA in the current DevOps-driven landscape. Automation is a natural step in introducing innovation into your software delivery and offers many new advancements in how quality assurance for a product can be achieved.

Furthermore, moving away from time-consuming manual testing to embrace automation is the only way for your organisation to remain competitive with its software delivery today. And it’s worth remembering that these benefits won’t just save your business time and money, they provide advantages for your testing engineers, product managers, end users, and everyone else too.

However, automated testing should not be seen as a way of removing responsibility towards quality from the project. It’s important to understand that these automated tests should serve as just one of many cohesive components of the overall SDLC. Quality assurance should still remain a priority even with automated tests in place, as they should be working in harmony to achieve the highest possible levels of quality across all phases of development.

Talk to Testhouse

To discover the possibilities available to your business when you embrace automated testing and transform your software development, get in touch with one of our certified QA consultants today.

To learn more about how to introduce automation into your testing processes, click here to read on.