How to Maximize Test Automation Benefits

Adoption of new working practices and methodologies has meant that organisations are constantly challenging themselves to get products and services to market faster than ever and in doing so are now having to think very hard how this can be achieved. We all know that first to market get the spoils, so there is a lot at stake getting the delivery model right. Test Automation is just one way of speeding up your project delivery and in doing so building up a regression pack of test scripts that can be run with little effort in little time.

The three greatest test automation benefits are, saving time, using resources more efficiently and effectively and easily increasing your test coverage.

Automation greatly increases the speed of the testing process and shortens the testing lifecycle. Automation never sleeps, so you can run scripts at any time of the day or night, along with running automation around a range of machines and platforms at the same time. Obviously, automated test scripts run faster than executing them manually.

Now that your automation is running as and when you want, you can utilise test resources more effectively and apply their skills where they are needed most, when they are needed as automated tests can execute unattended with results being published at the end of the regression test. Allowing test resources to have a broader remit allows them to consider test services not always factored into projects, like exploratory testing, performance and security testing.

Test Automation is a great way for you to increase your test coverage, quite simply once you have a set of automated tests you can test how the software reacts under various (different configs) and repeated execution of the same original test. Automated tests can easily be built up once you have the core tests in place, meaning that you can add tests in easily to the regression pack and build a larger test coverage quickly which would be time consuming to do manually.

A word of caution, always validate your automation tool of choice before purchasing. Look at your business model and future application landscape along with any other tech you may be considering. nFocus Testing can help with any proof of concept in these areas and help towards giving you an unbiased view of what tools work best for current and future operations.