“Hey, man! Some features of your app are crashing frequently.”
No tech business owner will ever want to receive this feedback about their products but, the fact is that having multiple complex features in an app can easily make it vulnerable to bugs. And, when you run a reputed business and have a lot of users, you must keep bringing out new updates to satisfy your users’ demands. In such cases, not checking the apps as well as their features thoroughly can easily lead them towards frequent crashes that will eventually result in a significant downfall in your business.
So, what can be an efficient approach to dealing with such situations?
Well, the primary thought about such situations must always be to prevent them from occurring, and that can only happen when you prioritize testing every bit of your apps minutely.
Now, you must know or have at least got the idea of how important software testing is. So, it is quite normal that the expert quality assurance engineers who perform those tests will take huge salaries and high levels of resources will be utilized in the process.
However, the enormous advancement in technology has also brought a solution that can easily fulfill your requirements without costing you an insane amount of money and other resources.
Yes, we are talking about test automation. We have already published detailed articles on what it is and how you can effectively proceed with it. Here, we will take an in-depth look at its prime benefits in this article.
The primary goal of every business is to achieve maximum efficiency in every aspect of its objectives. And, computers are mostly more efficient in performing continuous tasks than human beings because human beings often have to deal with a lot of things that cause distractions as well as inefficiency in those tasks. Also, a huge workload can make human beings exhausted.
On the other hand, automated tests are performed by computers or more specifically, by test automation tools. So, there remains no scope for distractions or fatigue in continuous test suites. As a result, test automation leads you to improved efficiency levels than you would achieve through manual tests.
You must be aware of the fact that one of the most important pillars of every business’s success is serving the best to the customers/clients with the least possible expenditure/investment.
Now, in the case of software testing, there is never a single-dimensional flow of tasks. An application can be used in multiple environments that consist of different browsers, different operating systems, different devices, etc. Now, you can clearly imagine what an insanely high number of test cases need to be run for testing an application, and what a long time it will take for QA engineers to manually perform those tests. Also, performing so many tests manually needs you to hire more QA engineers, and it will eventually lead you toward a huge expenditure.
At the same time, test automation enables you to get all the tests performed by advanced automated testing tools, and as a result, it becomes possible to let the tests run 24/7 without any drop in efficiency. Getting so much work done in comparatively much less time leads you toward fewer manual efforts as well as hiring less number of QA engineers. As a result, you become able to save a lot of money and time.
However, a question often arises that using test automation tools comes with an initial investment so, how can they be cost-effective? Well, if you analyze the initial investment made on those tools and setting up the primary infrastructure, and compare it with the savings you would make with automating tests and hiring fewer QA engineers, you can surely find out that automating your tests is the best way to save your resources.
As we previously mentioned, too much reliance on manual testing may lead to high levels of human errors that will eventually result in poor QA measures. Manual testing normally has probabilities of errors like entering wrong data or missing a few steps and so on.
On the other hand, computers will not do anything outside the programs and commands fed to them. So, to execute your software tests through automation, you just need to carefully set them once, and they will keep on performing the tests with perfection. Hence, test automation can definitely push you towards much better accuracy in software testing operations.
Another amazing benefit of test automation is that the use of advanced automated testing tools helps maintain a seamless collaboration among the team members. For example, Preflight, one of the most advanced AI-based test automation tools, allows the entire team to effectively collaborate and take an active part in the testing process without any barrier to coding knowledge.
Hence, such a seamless effective collaboration among team members allows to have a faster and smoother feedback system among them, and as a result, the overall time for quality assurance practices becomes shorter and the team becomes able to fix bugs quickly even when the product is live.
Often you have the requirement to run the same test cases in multiple conditions with very minor changes in the code or in the configurations but manual testing does not provide you that flexibility. As a result, you end up writing different test cases for every minor change in the code, and that can take a lot of time as well as resources.
On the other hand, automating your tests using advanced test automation tools exempts you from rewriting the test scripts for any change in the codebase. For example, Preflight uses such strong AI features that it easily adapts to all the changes in the app’s UI and its codebase. Hence, automating your tests using such powerful tools provides you with amazing reusability in the test cases without any additional cost and effort.
A significantly high test coverage is one of the ultimate goals for testing an application. Large enterprises normally have numerous applications that have multiple complex features. Now, testing each of those features in so many applications leads to having extremely large test suites.
Performing that many tests manually often becomes a time-consuming & cumbersome process, and often to maintain the product launch deadlines, companies get to launch the apps skipping many tests, which leads to very low test coverage.
Now, as we previously mentioned, test automation tools can keep on performing countless tests 24/7, and the best part is that advanced automated testing tools like Preflight allow you to initially set up the tests with just a few drag & drop actions and clicks. Hence, such overall speed in the process helps you achieve a remarkably higher test coverage within a pretty less time period.
Every business always tries to establish its brand name as the most trusted and most useful one in its field. Software testing plays an important role in helping you establish that brand name for your business. The better the test cases become, the better the app will work on satisfying more users.
Now, for good-quality test cases, the test data must also have a top-notch quality. Testing on the copies of live databases helps you create relevant test data but it takes a lot of time. Hence, using test automation tools enables you to create that test data in an unimaginably less time period, and you become able to enhance your brand value through properly tested applications.
Also, test automation keeps the stakeholders involved in the whole product development process so that the objective behind the application is met more closely. This results in a better level of digital innovation & revolution while also improving the brand recall value.
You may already know the importance of detailed testing as that is the only way to ensure that no portion of the app is left untested. Also, continuous testing is another crucial practice that stands for the uninterrupted running of automated tests so that whenever any bug is detected or any issue occurs, the dev team gets rapid feedback to take necessary actions.
Hence, you can clearly see that test automation is the only way to perform detailed tests continuously on complex applications, and achieve better results in the QA process.
This might look like an unimportant point to include in the benefits of test automation but the reality is actually different. Test automation plays an important role in improving the morale of software development teams. Let’s see how that happens.
While manually performing all the testing steps, the team members often stay stuck in repetitive boring tasks and do not get any chance to brainstorm new innovative ideas. Automating the tests using proper tools exempts them from performing such tiring and frustrating tasks and they get the opportunity to focus on new challenges and innovations. And, that indeed improves the team’s morale and the business becomes able to achieve new heights of success.
As we previously mentioned, the effectiveness and efficiency of your tests depend on the quality of your test data. And, you also got to know that manually creating such quality test data takes a lot of time. Besides taking such a long time, too much manual operation in creating test data also compromises the security of those data.
On the other hand, test automation not only speeds up the creation of test data but also improves information security.
Till now, you must have gotten the idea that test automation can make the bug detection process faster than manual testing approaches. And, it is evident that if the bugs are detected earlier in the product’s lifecycle, it becomes quite a lot easier for the dev team to get rid of the defects and launch a properly working product faster.
Earlier detection of defects is so useful in maintaining an overall faster development process that tech companies put a lot of focus on performing shift left testing, which is an efficient way to perform tests at an earlier phase of the development life cycle.
This may be described as the result of every other capability of test automation. As test automation enables the product teams to detect the bugs and fix them a lot faster, the overall time to launch the product in the market also gets reduced. That way, businesses get the chance to pay attention to improving their existing products as well as developing new ones.
Maintaining detailed reports of everything happening in the testing process is extremely crucial to have a clear idea of what is happening in the process and what the points of improvement are.
Whereas in manual testing such a reporting process becomes extremely time-consuming & exhausting, test automation makes it a matter of seconds. For example, while using Preflight, by the time you finish creating your tests, it becomes ready with every detail about your test suite.
The higher usage of advanced technologies makes test automation easily scalable according to market needs. Where scaling manual testing can be insanely resource-intensive, you can easily scale test automation through proper strategies and by using efficient tools.
All these amazing benefits of automating your tests are waiting for you to start using an efficient test automation tool. No matter how much information you collect about it, you cannot understand the true capabilities of test automation until you experience it yourself.
Now, automating your tests with Preflight can provide you with a top-notch test automation experience as this powerful browser extension allows you to create, run, and manage your tests within seconds regardless of whether you have coding experience or not. All you have to do is to sign up with us.
You can check out our super-affordable packages and the easiest process to select the best-suited one for you on our website. Do not hesitate to reach out to us for any queries. Also, we always keep coming up with amazing tech articles on our blog page.