What is QA Automation Testing and Is it Right for Your Team?

In this article:

• What is QA Automation testing and building the right team for QA Automation 
• Benefits of implementing QA Automation for your organization
• How QA Automation creates a more efficient work environment 
• Why QA Automation ensures quality and facilitates long term cost savings 

QA Automation testing is a practice that was once a luxury but has become essential now more than ever. In a recent InfoWorld study, 72% of midsize and large-size organizations are currently automating testing. With a world embracing digitization, especially in this era of work from home and expanded digital fronts for businesses to accommodate customer needs, updating software applications is crucial. The desire for high-quality software applications often faces challenges with time and delivery. It’s clear the pandemic has greatly accelerated a rapid shift to the digital world. More businesses conduct their operations through virtual facets, increasing expectations for speed and quality. Therefore, it’s no surprise that processes such as QA Automation are becoming more readily embraced. 

When assessing the best way to develop applications, QA Automation testing promises faster delivery without sacrificing quality. It’s a great way to bolster product delivery, but some technical leaders are hesitant about the practice given the investment needed. We have outlined some key steps and benefits worth considering.  

Great Teams Generate Great Returns  

Implementing strong QA Automation testing can present challenges in finding the right combination of skill sets when assembling teams. As with most things, finding the right leader is key.  For example, a QA Automation leader requires some development experience in addition to understanding different automation frameworks and QA knowledge. The leader and their team will also need to assess the level of automation, at the component level, integration level, and system level. While the strategy can be challenging to implement, when you assemble the right QA team, the benefits of automation far outweigh the upfront investment. QA Automation can save your team time, strengthen the quality of your application, and facilitate long-term cost savings for your organization. Let’s look at the benefits.

1. Time Savings

QA Automation testing contributes to the efficiency of your team, since they’re not tied up performing repetitive tasks that can be automated. In addition to increasing productivity, automation testing is not bound to a standard workday. Instead, automation testing can occur at all hours, giving your team time to focus on higher-value work. A faster result turnaround time allows your team to review the results in the morning and have more time to review failures. One test found that automation saved 16.5 hours of manual test efforts. 

QA Automation also reduces execution time because it allows your team to run cases in parallel. The time saved with QA automation testing is so efficient that the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline and DevOps process for applications depend on automation testing. Automation testing is a must for these because manually there would be no way to quickly implement them. 

2. Consistency of High-Quality Testing

The reality of QA Manual testing means not all teams are created equal and the distribution of work and quality may vary. With QA Automation testing, quality is ensured across the board. QA Automation also improves the quality of execution, since it can be run on multiple platforms, browsers, and devices. This reduction of human mistakes improves the quality of the application in its final form. 

3. Long Term Outlook provides High Value, Lowers Cost

Although QA Automation can have a higher cost at the outset due to more expensive resources and tools, in the long term QA Automation testing can provide cost savings. QA Automation replaces the need for manual case tests, reducing the cost of repeatedly buying manual case tests or paying a large QA team to run it manually. Eventually, the cost to automate runs close to zero, so while the upfront cost can be higher, when looking at the longevity of the benefits automation can bring to your team, it sustains value in these three very important areas. 

When looking at the cost of QA Automation as opposed to manual testing, you can easily track metrics. For example, we recommend looking at metrics such as the number of tests executed per hour, the number of bugs reported per sprint, and the time needed to execute a full regression test are great measures to highlight the value and investment of QA Automation.

In Conclusion

QA Automation testing is becoming an increasingly wise investment and importance to the efficiency of your software engineering team. This practice creates a system of faster software delivery, ensures quality, and saves money in the long run. QA Automation can bolster your team and their performance all while helping with the delivery of a better product for your customers. If you want to learn more, check out GAP’s QA Automation Services and our software and data engineering teams or contact us.

About Jennifer Castro

Jennifer Castro is a QA Automation Architect at Growth Acceleration Partners (GAP) with over 10 years of experience working on automation of web functional testing. She has designed automated frameworks, provided maintenance and created automated test cases. Jennifer leads software engineering teams at GAP and invests in people by delivering training and helping them with their career paths. You can connect with Jennifer on LinkedIn, or you can send her an email.