Automation Testing: Benefits and ROI

Automation testing is essential to product development, especially to guarantee quality. Many companies adopt manual testing, but there are other standard approaches than this. Automation testing helps you upgrade your software products to the next level. An organization should not stop by just choosing automation testing. Instead, it should extend the plans on how to implement it smoothly. While there are more benefits of automation testing in a business, drafting the budget for testing can be challenging.

The business case for automation testing refers to the justification for implementing the automation testing process in a particular software development project. Automation testing involves using scripts and specialized technologies to execute test cases. It also involves comparing actual and expected outcomes and reporting the results. A positive Return On Investment (ROI) depends on the decision to invest in automation testing techniques with benefits.

This article will specifically discuss the benefits of automation testing in business environments, the ROI of automation testing, and how to measure it.

Benefits of Automation Testing in Business

Here are the ten benefits of using automation testing in a business:

Decreased Business Expenses:

When your organization uses a good test automation environment, it allows you to achieve cost savings by minimizing the allocation of resources compared to manual testing activities. But, the main thing to note is eliminating manual testing usage. Over the entire course of the project, this can create a huge impact.

Faster Feedback Cycle

Without automation testing, organizations may struggle to get swift feedback on their software product’s new features. Automation testing helps speed the feedback process and quickly validates different product improvement stages. This mechanism is useful for identifying and fixing problems in the early stages of development, which makes the team work more efficiently.

Saves Time

By automating your testing process, your team has to spend less time assessing recently developed features. Automation testing also develops communication with all the software departments involving design, marketing, or product owners who depend on the outcomes of the tests. All the sectors in the development team can easily check the logs of the automated tests and what’s happening.

Higher Test Coverage

With manual testing, you can access a limited amount of test environments. But with test automation, you can effortlessly write modern test cases and add them to your business suite. This increases the scope for testing your project, which can help include all the features.

Reusability of Test Suite

Making an automated test case can be tough initially. However, once you set it up, using the same tests for different situations or even other projects is easy. The advantage is that you can connect another project to your already prepared test suite.

Better Insights with Automation Testing

Automation testing provides more insights when a test fails than a manual testing mechanism. It evaluates the product’s performance and tells us the details such as memory, file, and data tables. This detailed information helps developers identify and fix errors more effectively.

Create Products speedier

Testing cycles and shorter feedback times are made possible via speedier automation testing, which enables continuous testing of recently produced features. This aids an organization’s adoption of business agility techniques and quicker product establishment.

There Are More Features in Automation Testing

Complex scenarios can be prototyped using an automated test suite. Even several virtual users interacting with a single web application can be simulated by it. Manual testing is undoubtedly not capable of achieving this level of testing. Time and effort are saved by automation testing. Cloud Testing is the process of using the resources of a third-party cloud service provider to test software applications.

One of the most commonly used cloud testing tools is LambdaTest. It is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform to run manual and automated tests at scale. LambdaTest stands out as a prominent and widely adopted cross-browser testing tool, providing a comprehensive solution for modern software testing needs. Leveraging artificial intelligence, LambdaTest is a sophisticated test orchestration and execution platform designed to handle diverse testing scenarios. Whether it’s manual testing or automated testing, LambdaTest excels in facilitating these processes at scale, offering a dynamic environment for running tests seamlessly.

With support for over 3000 environments, LambdaTest enables users to validate their applications on various browser versions, operating systems, and devices, ensuring comprehensive test coverage.

The real-time testing feature allows testers to interact with applications in live environments, providing valuable insights into their behavior. Additionally, LambdaTest extends its capabilities to include automation testing, making it a versatile tool for quality assurance teams.

The inclusion of real mobile devices in the testing matrix further enhances its practicality, allowing for thorough testing of mobile applications. In essence, LambdaTest emerges as a powerful and AI-driven solution, streamlining the testing process and contributing to delivering high-quality software in today’s complex and dynamic development landscape.

Less Stress for the QA Staff

The QA team can avoid tedious manual testing by implementing an automation testing technology. This makes the QA team’s job easier, enabling them to concentrate more on important assignments. Cloud automated testing can be helpful for organizations to test the architecture, SaaS, and Cloud Native products easily.

Enhanced Accuracy

Even skilled QA engineers can make mistakes during tricky scenarios in manual testing. However, automated testing ensures accuracy. The QA team is also stress-free to work with the test cases.

Return on Investment (ROI)

ROI, which stands for return on investment, is a way to determine how to make a good investment. In this section, we will see the ROI of test automation in a typical business scenario. Nowadays, competition is getting tougher, and companies aim to work more in less time and a minimal amount. You can achieve this by automating test scenarios. The initial implementation can be costly, but it becomes cheaper as you keep going with automation testing.

Why Do We Need to Calculate ROI?

Why do lots of companies use automation testing? First, it helps test more things quickly and saves money over time. It lowers the chance of things going wrong and finds problems early on.

Imagine you have tasks that keep repeating. Automation testing can be five times faster and better than doing things manually. For example, if you automate tests in one part of a project, it won’t take much time to test them again the next time. Automation testing is like making a smart investment. Once you set it up, it helps your company for a long time. And if you want to know if your project needs an automated test suite, you need to check if it makes sense with the return on investment.

Finding the ROI can be useful in a variety of contexts:

It assists you in assessing the financial effects—whether favorable or unfavorable—that investing in automation will have on your company.
ROI makes it possible to project when the investment will pay off.
It provides a comprehensive understanding of the investment’s possible gains and losses.
Lastly, it gives you more confidence to persuade possible investors to back your goals during your business presentation.

The costs and the advantages can be expressed in terms of money or time. This is because benefits can be evaluated using the following metrics:

Savings as a result of automation
Decreased financial risks brought on by automation (such as the price of probable troubleshooting following the delivery of a defective product);
The time that is saved by work automation;
Money saved from staff salaries that would have been required for manual testing.

You can measure costs in terms of the following:

Money spent on deploying automation (e.g., building an automation team or requesting third-party testing services)
The time needed to work and set up automation tasks
Expenses for maintaining and developing the testing environment.

Best Practices for Improving Automation Testing ROI

Here are the best practices that your organization must follow when you plan to improve the ROI of the test automation suite:

Give priority to Automation: Automation is not necessary for everything. Save time and effort by beginning with basic, repetitive tests. Certain things work better when tested manually.

Note the Stability: Avoid automating an application that lacks stability. Automation only works well when the application is fully consistent.

Achieve a balance between Automated and Manual Testing: Always note that every test case progresses to a future regression test. Give ample time needed for both automated and manual test cases.

Test Case Integration: Integrate new test cases with existing ones, and this helps to create a comprehensive testing method that creates a long-term efficient impact of automated testing.

Parallel Testing: Use parallel testing to speed up the process with different environments with the same scenarios.

Shift Left for Early Testing: Nowadays, technology has allowed even developers to test at the early stage of the Software Development Cycle. (SDLC)

Test Case Management Tools: Use some trending technologies to manage the test case and for version control. TestSigma, App Perfect, Cloud Sleuth, and Bitbar are a few of the most used Cloud Automation testing tools to help you manage your test case.

Maintain Documentation: Maintain an accurate document to note down all the changes in the team and test cases. This helps you note down the team’s positive and negative impacts.

Common Pitfalls in Calculating ROI:

Here are some common mistakes that testers or companies make during the testing process:

Focusing only on automation: Focusing only on automation testing can sometimes lead to misunderstanding the problem. Manual testing should also be taken into account in some cases.

Team readiness: Ensure that your team is ready for a test. A team cannot perform without using tools, so give proper training and note down the team’s readiness.

Downgraded tests: Downgraded test cases are the main problems. The tests should be maintained and updated regularly according to the industry and project standards.

Focusing only on Short-term success: The team should focus on the entire project lifecycle rather than focusing only on the particular test module.

Sharing the ROI of Automation Testing

Here are some ways to share the ROI of your automation testing:

Specify the Objectives: Start the process by defining clear goals and strategies for the test cases and introducing them step-by-step.

Pictorial Representation: Always use visualization tools, charts, graphs, and pictures to explain the positive rise or negative fall.

Case Studies: Share case studies, real-life business cases, and trending scenarios to explain the ROI effectively to the team.

Provide practical examples: Always offer practical examples and recommendations to the team and always enhance their working potential.

Conclusion

As we conclude, automation testing helps an organization avoid repetitive tasks and enhances the testing pipeline of the project. However, calculating a budget, hiring personnel, and adapting to dynamic environments are the most common challenges in measuring the ROI. ROI is dependent on the art of choosing the methodologies and ways to implement the testing suite. And most importantly, a team must be ready to adapt to the changing test environment and ensure early-stage testing. Moreover, a standard or a typical testing mechanism doesn’t exist for all organizations. They must select a method appropriately which suits their project requirements.