Reasons To Automate In Agile

In any field, automation reduces the costs and increases the productivity.Automation and Agile are the new buzz words and automation has become an important part of agile testing that it is really difficult to think of one without the other.

Let's see the reasons why automation is given importance in testing:

1.Exhaustive Testing:

?Detailed and exhaustive examination of the code can be only done by doing repeated testing which is efficiently done by the use of automation.Automation helps in ensuring the code quality that too in restrained testing window.

2.Code Quality:

In Automation there is a standard suite or collection of test scripts which allows to quickly challenge and check the code allowing both testing and developments teams a quick peek into the code quality and also gives enough time to the teams to check and react in case the code is not properly set.

3.Continuous Testing:

Agile demands that testing should be continuous and should be done in early stages.Covering full scope has always been a challenge for testers and test coverage means to test the code of previous iterations along with the newly added code just to ensure that previous functionality doesn't break due to new added functionality which again brings the testers under pressure which further can directly affect the quality of the product.Automation comes to rescue here which allows more time to testers to go for exploratory testing by automating some part of the testing.

4.Incremental Development:

Agile brings in the concept of short development cycle in iterations which means agile teams have very less time in which they have to understand the requirements, do the code, make the changes in the code and test the changes.If all this is done manually, then the purpose of going agile is defeated and doing testing in hurry means compromising the product quality.

5.Frequent Changes:

The beauty of agile is quick adaptability to the changes.In agile,there are no defined requirements.Requirements develop with the time and keeps on changing based on the customer priorities and end user needs but as development can be adapted according to the changes so is expected from testing.Here again automation brings in the agility to testing and helps to respond efficiently to the changes that too fast.

6.Other Activities:

Apart from automating the testing and executing test scripts there are other activities as well like test reporting, data set up, test result validation, deployments etc which can be automated which gives more time to testers to focus only on testing by eliminating the repetitive tasks.

Also let's take a look at some ideal candidates eligible for automation:

• Simple or direct test cases.
• Test cases with multiple test data and conditions.
• Regression pack cases.
• Critical business functions

To conclude, Test automation should be a well though out process so that it is cost effective and also gives good expected returns.Test automation should start parallel to the development so that time is not wasted and that time can be utilized for testing instead in enabling automation.

"Test automation is best developed incrementally in agile projects"