Top 12 Benefits of QA Automation

New technologies are permanently growing in number, complexity and the range of functions they can perform, that’s why the quality at speed has become a strategic goal for software companies. Test automation is a true silver bullet in this regard. Companies are prioritizing moving from manual to automated testing as quickly as possible and that’s why moving to automated testing is the top priority around software testing (30% of companies mentioned it as the top priority according to these test automation statistics). The global automation testing market is also expected to grow at 18% and reach USD 28.8 billion by 2024. These numbers are impressive, but shifting to automated software testing needs money and resource investment, so why do companies prefer it? We collected the top 12 advantages of test automation which can explain its growing popularity and also help you decide whether it’s the right choice for your organization.

1. Faster Testing Cycles

QA automation tools free you up from repeating test cases, giving you the time to compile other test scenarios. Speaking about the code quality and testing automation, here tests can be run as soon as the development starts, so you can shift left better and detect the bugs earlier. Thus, the solution stays solid and bug-free after every change deployed in production, which significantly economizes companies’ time and budget.

2. Tests Are Scheduled 24/7

One of the major benefits of automated testing is the flexibility to run tests 24/7 from any place in the world, which is impossible in manual testing. In automation, all you need is to schedule your test case to run at a certain hour of the day and analyze the generated reports with test results from any location worldwide.

3. Test Cases Are Reusable

Another benefit of QA automation is the reusability of the test scripts. Writing an effective test case requires a lot of time and resources in both manual and automation software testing strategies, but in the last one if you need to run it again, you don’t need to rebuild it but simply reuse it as many times as you like without forgetting any steps, even on different OS and platforms.

4. Parallel Testing On Multiple Platforms

Any ready-made website needs to be tested on compatibility and performance on various hardware models, operating systems, browsers, networks, and even mobile devices. Such testing requires the creation of a huge number of similar test cases. Performing it manually may result in delaying the release, when QA automation allows to run tests on thousands of browsers, operating systems, and devices simultaneously and in a short time.

5. Faster Regression Testing

Manual regression testing is a very time-consuming operation as for every fix deployed in production, engineers have to execute a set of similar test cases to ensure that the bug has been removed. Moreover, this method has the following issues:

• creates congestion in the release cycle making it inflexible;
• works badly when the software is updated because of the time limits;
• it’s impossible to check whether the tests are performed the same way every time.

QA automation helps to eliminate all the above issues, as here the time window can be extended, and the compiled test case can be reused numerous times.

6. Easy Smoke Testing

Performing smoke testing is important to avoid outages and is widely recommended as a best practice, but it’s often neglected by companies as they are afraid to squeeze their testers’ bandwidth. Here ideally comes QA automation: you create automated smoke test scenarios and easily run them on a regular basis.

7. Complex Test Scenarios

One of the greatest benefits of automated testing over manual testing is that it can perform lengthy test scenarios with dozens of steps. Manual testing here can lead to a faulty assurance by a mere distraction, while in automation you only need to write a suitable test script.

8. Maximized Test Coverage

It’s quite challenging for a complex web application to be 100% covered by manual tests when QA automation is a real helper in this: it ensures the proper work of databases, web services, and so on as per the business requirements, while QA engineers get enough resources to come up with robust test scenarios. Plus, results generated from the automation tools help testers enhance the quality of test scripts written manually and improve the overall test coverage of the application.

9. Insightful Test Reports

In manual testing, engineers have to report to each other manually to see the number of performed test scripts and what bugs have been fixed. In the case of automated reporting, you get deep insights into the testing activities and the state of your product in real-time with info on passed/failed scenarios detected bugs, and the percentage of test coverage. With such a level of visibility, it’s easier to identify the areas that need more attention and improve the overall quality of the product.

10. High Security

In order to speed up the process, manual testing is often performed on copies of live databases, which is not really safe. Test automation tools like DogQ help to create, monitor and manipulate your test database, so you can re-use it any time and stay protected. As a bonus, automatic prevention of data breaches helps to save costs and time for product realization.

11. Reduced Business Expenses

Although the initial investment in QA automation can be quite high, it allows to get rid of numerous additional expenses and better allocate manpower resources in the long run. Once your automation test scripts are all set you need minimal hands on deck to monitor the process, and troubleshoot in case of failures. The quality of work gets higher while business expenses are significantly decreased.

12. Faster Time to Market

Launching a bug-free product takes a lot of time with manual testing, while automation makes it much faster: it takes care of repetitive tasks, lessens the number of engineers on board, and maximizes ROI for businesses as a bonus.

There could be even more benefits of QA automation as it’s constantly progressing, but here we have listed the top 12 of them, and we hope they will help you decide upon the necessity of shifting to automation. Did they sound convincing or not? Probably, we missed the points you need? Feel free to share your thoughts on our social networks, and our technical specialists will be happy to answer them and guide you through the advantages and disadvantages of automated testing. Thank you for reading and feel free to try our codeless testing platform!