When you build any piece of software be it a website, a web application, or a computer program, you follow certain goals. These can vary starting from achieving more results from your digital marketing like traffic, sales, and satisfied clients. The main condition to achieve all of them is making sure that your digital product corresponds to the business requirements and offers a flawless user experience.
There are two ways to make this happen: manual testing, where a specialist creates the use-cases and manually follows all the steps to find out if everything is working as expected, and automation testing, where all the scenarios are written in the code and executed with the help of auxiliary software for test automation depending on the scenario. There can be API testing tools used for input/output testing and API calls validation, cross-platform testing software to check how an application performs on different OS and devices, or multi-functional ones combining these and other features that simplify test case processing and execution.
When a digital product becomes more mature and acquires new features and functionality, QA specialists will have to increase the test coverage. Automated testing is the logical step to implement in such cases. Nothing strange here, as the potential of automation is bigger than the manual approach. So here’s how test automation contributes to improving software efficiency:
High accuracy
In testing, accuracy is everything, as the missed bug released on production may spoil user impressions. In the case of manual testing, the specialists are going through the same contact forms, and simulate user behavior every day. It’s a monotonous work that requires full concentration that is possible at first but sometimes there may be issues caused by tunnel vision, hard-working days, or simply inattentiveness. The good thing about automation, the code is never tired and the effectiveness always stays on a high level no matter how many times the test is executed. If there’s an error, the outcome will report it.
Faster delivery time
As automation tests require minimum involvement of your specialists ( only for scheduling it and checking the results) and several tests can be run at a time, you will receive the results faster. It means that you will be aware of the issues earlier and forward them to the dev team so that they can eliminate all the critical flaws. This way, the communication of the issues and collaboration between QA and software development departments speeds up the release of the application or a website to the end-users so that they can faster enjoy the new functionalities.
The only way to perform certain types of testing
Some critical test types to ensure application stability can be performed only with automation. For instance, regression testing when you need to check if a new feature does not break the existing ones and you need to check all previously developed functionality to confirm this. Another case is the load and stress testing when you need to simulate the traffic influx as if it was coming from real users to see the maximum capacity of your website or application and introduce the necessary changes where it’s required.
For sure to achieve the best possible performance, it’s required to test the software from all angles involving both manual and automatic testing. None of these methods are perfect when used alone because manual testing is depending on humans’ imperfection and automates scripts cannot assess the usability, provide feedback on the design of certain elements, as well as conduct exploratory testing. However, when used in combination, they complement one another so you can rest assured you make the most from the testing process.
