QA Automation is for everyone, whether you are a startup with a single product and few early adopters or a mid-sized company with a portfolio of products and multiple deployments. It assures product quality by ensuring maximum test coverage that is consistently executed prior to every release and is done in the most efficient manner possible.
Test Automation does not mean having fewer Test Engineers – It means using them efficiently in scenarios that warrant skilled testing, with routine and repetitive tests automated.
Looking to automate your test cycles but worried about ROI? Let us help. Let’s talk!
When done right, Test Automation unlocks significant value for the business. The Return on Investment (RoI) is a classical approach that attempts to quantify the impact and in turn, justify the investment decision.
However, the simplistic approach that is typically adopted to compute RoI provides a myopic view of the value derived from test automation. More importantly, it offers very little information to the Management on how to leverage additional savings and value from the initiative. Hence, it is vital that the RoI calculations take into account all the factors that contribute to its success.
Limitations of the conventional model to compute Test Automation ROI
Software leadership teams treat QA as a cost center and therefore apply a simplistic approach to computing RoI. The formula applied is
You may quickly notice the limitation in this formula. RoI should take into account the ‘Returns’ gained from ‘Investments’ made.
By only considering the Cost Savings gained from the reduction in testing, the true value of Test Automation is grossly underestimated.
In addition to the savings in terms of resources, attributes like the value of faster time to market, the opportunity cost of a bad Customer Experience due to buggy code, and being resilient to attrition, need to be factored in to fully compute the “Returns” earned. How to determine the value of these factors and incorporate them into the RoI formula is another blog in itself
Beyond Faster Testing – 5 ways to lower costs with Test Automation
For the moment, we will explore how companies can derive maximum savings while in Test Automation implementation. While calculating the ‘Cost Savings’ component of the RoI, it is important to take at least a 3-year view of the evolution of the product portfolio and its impact on the testing needs. The primary reason is that the ratio of manual tests to regression tests decreases over time and the percentage of tests that can be automated to total tests increases. With this critical factor in mind, let us look at how businesses can unlock additional savings
Test Automation Framework – Build vs. Partner
The initial instinct of software teams is to pick one of the open-source frameworks and quickly customize it for your specific need. While it’s a good strategy to get started, as the product mix grows and the scope of testing increases, considerable effort is needed to keep the Framework relevant or to fully integrate the framework into your CI/CD pipeline. This additional effort could wipe away any gains made with test automation
By using a vendor or testing partner’s Test Automation Framework, the Engineering team can be assured that it’s versatile to suit their future needs, give them the freedom to use different tools, and most importantly benefit from the industry best practices, thereby eliminating trial and error.
Create test scripts faster with ‘Accelerators’
When partnering with a QE provider with relevant domain expertise, you can take advantage of the partners’ suite of pre-built test cases to get started quickly. With little or no customization, the ‘accelerators’ allow you to create and run your initial test scripts and get results faster.
Accelerators also serve as a guide to design a test suite that maximizes coverage
Using accelerators to create the standard use cases typical for that industry ensures that your team has the bandwidth to invest in the use cases unique to your product and requires special attention.
Automate Test Design, Execution and Maintenance
When people talk of Test Automation, the term “automate” usually refers to test execution. However, execution is just 30% of the testing process. To accelerate the pace of production releases require unlocking efficiency across the testing cycle including design & maintenance.
Visual Test Design to gather functional requirements and develop the optimal number of most relevant tests, AI tools for efficient and automated test maintenance without generating any technical debt need to be leveraged. When implemented right, they deliver 30% gains in creation and 50% savings in maintenance
Shift Performance Testing left with Automation
In addition to creating capacity for the QA team to focus on tests to assure that the innovations deliver the expected value, you can set up Automated Performance Testing to rapidly check the speed, response time, reliability, resource usage, and scalability of software under an expected workload.
Shifting performance testing left allows you to identify potential performance bottleneck issues earlier in the development cycle. Performance issues are tricky to resolve, especially if issues are related to code or architecture. Test Automation enables automated performance testing and in turn, assures functional and performance quality.
Automate deployment of Test Data Sets
Creating or generating quality test data, specially Transactional Data Sets, have been known to cause delays. Based on our experience, the average time lost in waiting for the right test data is 5 days, while for innovation use cases, they take weeks. For thorough testing, often the test data needs to change during the execution of the test, which needs to be catered for
With a Test Data Automation, the test database can be refreshed on-demand. Testers access data subsets required for their suite of test cases and consistent data sets are utilized across multiple environments. Using a cogent test data set across varied use cases allows for data-driven insights for the entire product – which would be difficult with test data silos
Maximize your ROI with Trigent
The benefits, and therefore the ‘Returns’, from Test Automation, go well beyond the savings from reduced manual testing time and effort. It also serves as insurance against attrition! Losing people is inevitable, but you can ensure that the historical product knowledge is retained with your extensive suite of automated test scripts.
Partnering with a QE Service Provider having relevant domain experience will enable you to get your Quality processes right the first time – And get it done fast. Saving you valuable time and money. And it frees up your in-house team to focus on the test cases to assure the customer experiences that make your product special.
Do your QA efforts meet all your application needs? Is it yielding the desired ROI? Let’s talk!
