Could a robot do your job? Sure, they could. Soon enough. That’s what robots like HERB is being trained to do. The ‘Home-Exploring Robot Butler’ under development at the Carnegie Mellon is learning to retrieve and deliver objects, prepare simple…
Could a robot do your job? Sure, they could. Soon enough. That’s what robots like HERB is being trained to do. The ‘Home-Exploring Robot Butler’ under development at the Carnegie Mellon is learning to retrieve and deliver objects, prepare simple meals and empty a grocery bag (ref *USA Today)
So be it automatic insulin injections or kids born today without need to learn to drive, software can be built to do anything.
Agree?
So why not build software to test software?
If one computer is worth calculation speeds of hundreds of mathematicians, wouldn’t a software be worthy an army of human testers?
For most companies, quality assurance measures, such as testing, are a major cost factor in software development projects. While many managers and companies today expect software test automation to be a silver bullet i.e. helping them kill the problems related to mundane repetitive tasks, test scheduling, defect reporting and cutting manual costs and working hours involved — setting realistic expectations as to where the benefits should be derived from test automation are key to finding success in an organization’s decision.
Like all testing activities, behind the decision to automate some tests is a cost and benefit analysis.”
Automation can save time, increase speed, reduce cost and increase coverage and make testing more effective. Or it can distract you and waste your resources.
Calculating ROI: Manual Vs Automation
While in most cases, test automation often starts with a set of existing manuals tests –however, as cycles speed up and volume and complexity increase, the only way to sustain quality is to through automation.
Depending on different user cases or needs that need to be adapted to a specific project and current stages, ROI can be calculated per test type and under various constraints.
General Formula
Obviously, the ROI will be positive if the gain exceeds the cost.
Costs to be Considered:
Cost of automation is proportional to the cost of development of the actual application. Typical cost factors include direct and indirect costs.
Direct Costs: Tool costs relevant to the test automation tool
- Tool acquisition (hardware, scripting tools) and assessment costs
- Licenses for a commercial automation tool some of which could either include annual maintenance cost, or annual license charges
- Initial training/ high resource cost for skilled automation engineers
- Configuration costs
Direct Costs: Related to each application being tested
- Training of project-specific staff members
- Creation of test automation framework, test data and automated tests cases
- Creation, maintenance, and execution of manual and automated test cases (if not all cases are automated)
Indirect Costs:
would include added overhead of maintaining automation scripts or costs originating from undetected failures or increased risks of not detecting a lapse before the application is used in production.
Benefits of Test Automation
Automated testing delivers businesses benefits in multiple areas of development for most companies. The top-ranked areas of value are:
- Greater staff efficiency and time savings: Even highly trained manual testers cannot outperform an automated suite of test cases. This is particularly helpful while close to a project deadline when you need to rush a series of regressions testing after any changes are introduced.
- Early identification of defects before any business impact: Functional automation tests always validate each of its checkpoints to fulfill expected results. Any gaps can be easily identified before production. Moreover, execution of automated test suites triggered periodically can report any bugs or inconsistencies in the program.
- Higher quality in business processes and the software that supports them: As faster defect detection leads to a greater saving in overall development time and cost and leads to faster efficiencies.
- Faster time to market: That unfolds to financial gains and competitive edge over opposition.
- Faster deployment of innovation and new features for business users: Which in turn leads to a better product that helps increase customer satisfaction.
Good management decisions can made about using automation testing by recognizing the need and estimating test automation costs and benefits. This helps to identify the critical factors to focus on and makes the most of an organisation’s investment.