The software industry has boomed over the past few years. However, the only thing that differentiates the technology that manages to create an impression vs the technology that fails is the quality factor. Products that are released to the market with major security vulnerabilities like bugs and other issues are likely to invite risks and create a potential business loss.
At times, products that are already performing well in the market have to bear the struggle of keeping the product updated. It increases the frequency for the release of updates but even creates the challenge of achieving Quality Assurance benchmarks quickly.
Since QA automation is the only way to achieve the required rapidity in the test process, integrating the same into the development and designing stages could help testers to yield extensive benefits. In other words, test automation adds to the revenue by offering greater efficiency and robustness on the software.
Though it can be achieved using several test automation tools available in the market, planning on what needs to be automated and what needs to be skipped is a crucial factor that decides the fate of a product. However, automation testing brings the advantage of testing a software or application multiple times bypassing extensive manual efforts.
In this blog, we will aim at highlighting the most important test automation strategies that testers, developers, and business executives should consider when need to drive better market response, product quality, and of course business revenue.
Essential and effective test automation strategies
Let’s begin with exploring all the essential and effective test automation strategies that can help generate greater revenue in business:
Tool Selection
When working on a business solution or enterprise software, developers often have to deal with various challenges. These challenges vary from frequently changing project requirements to scaling the product under development. However, one thing that can help testers to keep things streamlined is the selection of the right test automation tools for the right implementation of the strategy.
Some of the most amazing automation tools that you might like to consider for your upcoming test automation project include:
Selenium: Selenium is one of the most widely used web testing tools that is used for automating testing services on web browsers for different platforms. Selenium not only helps testers to improve the functional test coverage but offers compatibility on different browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Mozilla.
From removing errors to taking over vulnerabilities, selenium offers extensive benefits like flexibility, implementation, open-source availability, language support, integrations, parallel test execution, minimum hardware usage, reusability, and support on various operating systems.
Appium: Appium is another open-source test automation tool that offers support for all mobile and web applications, native or hybrid made for android and iOS. It allows you to write tests against multiple platforms using similar APIs with code reusability benefits.
Appium can be used for your preferred frameworks and test practices with the convenience of automation of any application for any framework and language. It allows you to utilize Dev tools to write tests and does not need any SDK. All in all, it is suitable for all emulators and simulators.
JMeter: JMeter is powerful open-source testing software. Based on Java, it allows users to work on diverse testing categories like functional testing, performance testing, and regression testing. With an easy to user interface, using JMeter does not require any advanced programming skills.
JMeter allows you to examine software under different loads, obtain a graphical analysis of performance and offer other thread group features that can help check if the performance of the software is good or needs improvement. JMeter even allows you to record tests for native applications and ensure easy installation on different operating systems with hassle-free API and database testing.
Understanding the significance of automated testing
Test automation offers great efficiency to the testers reducing overhead and allowing testers to complete complex tasks in a short duration. Executed during the initial phase of the software development lifecycle, automation aids with efficiency on development time with minimal human interaction.
As long as it is concerned with the ROI, the business organization must ensure the use of the right automation tool that can help with easy-to-use and customized test scripts. The effective selection of tools simplifies testing different areas of an application with expanded test coverage and parallel execution.
All in all, it is vital for testers to understand the importance of automation testing when they need to foster continuous integration. Automation testing is an essential and significant practice that helps testers to build, test, and deploy multiple times while proactively detecting any flaws in the system.
Deciding what must be automated
One of the most significant aspects of driving revenue with a test automation strategy is to understand what must be automated. The process thus involves testers and developers who have a thorough understanding of the project requirements.
From project scope to its type, automation testing should be opted after developing an understanding of the team’s strength related to programming language plus anything that can help yield value from the project.
In other words, the ROI of any test automation project depends on understanding the requirements of the project. Being informed of the project helps testers to learn the total number of test cases required to automate a test project and understand the most important activities that must be automated.
Since it is not feasible for most testers to have a definite understanding of what tasks must be automated, focusing on factors like software environment, network dependencies, hardware requirements, and the objective of the application under test could make things much easier.
Here we have a few important points that must be kept in mind when planning tasks that need to be automated:
- Non-functional aspects like performance and security testing are hard to test manually.
- Tests associated with an application are likely to contain greater defects and errors.
- Complicated calculations and crunching through complex data are vital for automating test cases.
- User actions require periodical environment setups to test.
- The test cases made for automation involve extensive repetition.
Create test cases with a minimum maintenance requirement
Since working on UI and functionality require frequent updates, testers often struggle working on automated test scripts. Therefore, it is always a good idea to create test scripts that contain self-healing properties and help avoid creating automated test scripts for subsequent versions.
A good way to prevent unwanted efforts could be locating UI objects and properties when working on test scripts. Besides, testers can work on using unique identifiers and UI control names to ensure automated tests are not affected when any changes in the application or software UI are made. Such an intelligent approach to testing could allow testers to enjoy the smooth functioning of automated tests and therefore add more revenue.
Conclusion
When testers need to ensure better ROI, the only thing they need to focus is creating test strategies that can offer faster feedback, improved accuracy, deeper insights, control on business expenses, test suite reusability, and everything that can help save time and costs.
All in all, test automation is a highly impactful practice for business organizations that are aiming to enhance their revenue. However, it is not always necessary to automate everything related to a test project as working continuously on automation test cases could cost massive labor and time expenses.
Therefore, establishing the right balance between manual and automation testing services could be of great help to a business that needs to meet the quality requirements and optimum returns. And if you have all the resources available to combine modern testing practices like Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD integration, it brings you all the potential you need to increase business revenue using QA automation.
Source: How Business can Increase Revenue with QA Automation
