A perspective on Software Test Automation – Part 2

A perspective on Software Test Automation – Part 2

In our last article, we discussed the introduction of the test automation into the Software development life cycle. We will now look at the aspects which have to be considered in detail while automating the testing of the software.

• ROI (Return on Investment) on Test Automation after doing CBA (Cost-Based Analysis)

  Test automation is done for the applications which have to be tested frequently over the period of multiple quarters. It’s economic to automate the repetitive test cases to have maximum Return on Investment as initial cost of automation is very high. However, once the automation is set up the cost of execution of that is less as automation performs multiple tasks like test execution and reporting automatically which would have otherwise required a lot of manual testers.

• Stability of Application

  The requirements which are not going to change frequently are the prime choice for the automation for outsource software testing . Consider an application with GUI Front End, where the business logic in the backend keeps changing frequently, however, the GUI changes are minimal. In this case, GUI testing can be surely automated as the changes in the GUI are minimal. However, it is advised not to introduce automation in the part of the project that is unstable and keeps on going through multiple changes in very short amount of time.

• Maintenance Life Cycle of the application under test

  If the application has been already deployed in the production and under the maintenance mode and the application life cycle is very long, then such types of applications are the good candidates for the automation. Any kind of bug fix will need the regression testing of entire application as testers need to check if the enhancement in the application has introduced any new defect in the same or some other part of the application. All these test cases are supposed to run frequently without many modifications and can be automated.

• Resource training needs

  Test automation is different from manual testing. Basically, Test Automation is a development activity which requires hands-on coding. It would take manual testers a lot of time to understand the concepts related to coding, programming and scripting, in absence of any sort of prior experience. Without prior programming experience, it’s difficult to grasp the test automation tool-kits and library APIs.

• Selection of technology for test automation

  A wide variety of Proprietary and open source tools are available. Open source tools are free to use. However, the downside is that the support for open source tools is minimal and the upgrades are infrequent if the open source tool is not under active development. Proprietary tools are more user-friendly and supported in better way, but the flip side is the high cost associated with the licensing of these tools.

  So based on these factors for any project important decisions like whether to automate or not to automate, when to automate and the extent to which the automation is used are made. So before automating the test processes in your organization ponder on these points for better results.