It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee. Especially if you think that you can deliver high quality, reduce costs and improve time-to-market only with manual testing. According to the World Quality Report of 2016-17, manual testing is a key application development challenge.
Yet, most of the digital landscape today is reliant on manual testing, which often becomes a bottleneck when supporting the rapid cadence of releases.
Rather than waiting for the iceberg to tip over, enterprises should look out for signs which indicate that it is time to implement test automation within their projects.
I have listed below 8 signs to look out for.
1) Longer test cycles impacting project time to market
In today’s digital world, time-to-market is an increasingly important factor for software development projects. It is also a crucial requisite to remain competitive. However, teams that rely only on manual testing often find it difficult to adhere to release schedules, as manual testing can be cumbersome and time consuming.
2) Challenge to ensure test coverage in each iteration
Manual testing of new features along with regression testing of existing functionality is a tedious effort, which increases as new features are added at every iteration. Teams often struggle to align all test activities within short iterations by relying solely on manual testing, which leads to inadequate test coverage and poor software quality.
3) Defects identified late in the project
Over reliance on manual testing lead to late defect detection because of lack of continuous and parallel regression testing for each change made in the code base. Identifying problems when it is too late is certainly not helpful as ‘testing delayed is testing denied’. Defects detected at a very late stage, impact delivery timelines and many a times are left unfixed as the cost of fixing them is too expensive.
4) Project costs are increasing
Manual testing is labour intensive activity. Therefore delays in identifying issues is expensive, involving additional staff to ensure test coverage and meet stringent deadlines, which further increases the cumulative costs of the project. On the contrary, finding and fixing defects early by utilising automated tests delivers cost savings.
5) Struggling to get real-time information on Testing
You have to wait for lengthy manual functional and regression test cycles to complete before getting any idea about the quality of software. This often delays key decisions. Automated functional and regression testing saves time while providing transparency in terms of quality of software, which helps stakeholders in making informed decisions based on real-time insights.
6) Continuous builds but less time to test everything
Teams that adopt the Agile discipline, but ignore test automation often come across scenario where testers struggle to execute all planned tests before the next build is rolled out. Automated regression test suites enable QA team to focus on new changes while parallel automated regression tests rule out any negative impact on existing functionality.
7) Testing diverse applications is a problem
In the evolving digital landscape more often than not testers have to deal with a diverse set of applications, which must be supported across multiple platforms, devices and browsers. As the number of combinations increase, the testing complexity grows exponentially and the test coverage goes down if we rely solely on manual testing. It is time to start automating your work and let the computer run cross platform, cross devices and cross browser tests for you.
8) Your testers regularly extend release deadlines
Are your testers panicking before each release schedule? Do they request you to extend release time by one or two weeks? Testers state that they do not have enough time to test and have doubts regarding the quality of software. These worrying signs indicate that automation is overdue. You must revisit your test strategy and implement test automation at earliest.
Though the adoption of test automation is an imperative for increasing the effectiveness, efficiency and coverage of your software testing, it is important to understand that test automation has an initial cost associated with it. Therefore, when implemented poorly, test automation can hurt your project budgets without providing the expected benefits. Conversely, a thoughtful test automation implementation increases the overall software efficiency delivering better quality software, which can be released earlier with less effort and by utilising fewer resources.
Need to deliver products and services to market faster? Connect with us as info@mastek.com to find out how Mastek’s Test Automation services can help you achieve your business objectives.
