The Myth About Test Automation

Test automation professionals can count benefits or aims of test automation as:

• Save time and money
• Increase test coverage and quality
• Decrease human factor in testing
• Increase confidence of development teams
• Create a living documentation of the SUT

Among these, the first one almost automatically comes to our mind as testing professionals. We strongly believe that a good test automation system will save our time by reducing the effort of manual testing.

However I doubt that test automation saves efforts of testers. Ok they'll spend less time on manual testing. But other tasks will be waiting for them.

First of all, testers will have to maintain current automation scripts. Especially test data maintenance will be a significant task in those test environments where manual testing and automation is done together. Their first duty will be to find new test data for their automation scripts because old ones will be tampered in manual tests. They will be busy either finding new data or enhancing their scripts to find or create their own. Reflecting the latest increments to the scripts will be another point of maintenance.

Secondly, testers will be busy adding new scenarios to the existing portfolio. Every sprint the team is supposed to make an increment and this may mean there is some other test to automate.

Moreover there will always be some manuel tests to do. It is rare that a team can automate 100% of its tests.

At the end of the day, testers will be busy as usual. So the real benefit of test automation will be the number of test execution. After each deployment to each test environment, it will be possible to run all tests from scratch.

To sum up, I believe that it is a myth that test automation will save time of testers. They will be busy as usual. However other benefits still worth the price and the pain, what do you think?