Speed, frequency, volume, quality: automating functional testing offers many benefits for securing your business.
Mr Suricate why this can be a long-term investment.
The vast majority of testing is performed manually by development teams (developers, testers, etc.), who verify that everything is working correctly on their own by conducting what are known as manual tests. However, certain tests—particularly functional tests—can be automated. This means they are executed without human intervention, but rather by “robots, ” based on specifications that have been agreed upon and established in advance. The choice between manual and automated testing depends on several factors related to the project itself and organizational constraints, but opting for test automation offers significant benefits that should not be overlooked—here are five of them.
1. Improve the Move to Production Process
The faster validation tasks are completed, the quicker you can get a clear picture of your applications’ quality, which helps speed up the go-live process. And if you go live faster, you reduce your time to market—that is, the time it takes to bring your product to market. This is a key advantage for standing out from the competition by rolling out anticipated features more quickly.
Improving the “Move to Production” process while ensuring optimal quality is an essential ongoing priority in Agile development, where increments must be deployed to production on a regular basis. Integrating automation into a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline is therefore not an option.
2. Save time
One of the most significant benefits of automation is the reduction in the time required to run tests. Some checks can take several hours when performed manually, whereas a bot can complete them in just a few minutes when hundreds of test runs are executed in parallel. In fact, we recommend automating the most frequent and repetitive tests, such as non-regression tests and acceptance tests.
For example, at Mr Suricate, in 2021, we ran 10,741,424 test scenarios, with an average duration of 3.7 minutes per run. This is equivalent to 27,600 days—or 75 years—of manual testing saved for all our clients combined over the course of the year.
3. Relieve the technical teams
By automating repetitive validation tasks, technical teams are freed from some of the testing work and can focus solely on analyzing and resolving issues. This allows them to focus on other value-added tasks, such as validating upcoming updates, creating test cases based on requirements in collaboration with the team, performing more complex manual tests, and implementing new automated tests.
4. Ensure continuous coverage
Best practice in testing is to test early and everywhere. But in reality, it’s more complicated. Not all features can be verified manually during each acceptance test—only the most critical ones. Thanks to automation, we can set up tests for every fix, update, and deployment. And we can also run them as early as possible in the process—from the design phase of a web project through to production, and even beyond. This ensures consistent coverage of all features.
5. Improving Test Quality
To err is human, and in fact, mistakes are often made during repetitive tasks due to a lack of concentration or fatigue. Automating functional tests helps prevent this kind of bias by providing comprehensive, consistent tests, which improves quality. Nevertheless, it’s important to combine both approaches by having human teams perform manual checks whenever a test scenario fails, to ensure that these are genuine defects and not false positives.
To avoid the “ pesticide principle , ” it is also important to regularly monitor and update the test data used to cover a wider range of cases.
In conclusion, the long-term ROI of automation is clear, but it is an “investment” because the upfront cost is significant and will require a solid automation strategy to select the right tool and implement the appropriate technical architecture and team processes.
But that's for a future episode!
