Testing Automation - Should not be an afterthought!

In this fast-paced world, the need for changes in the business process manifests almost daily either to align with the external market demand or for better internal efficiency. With our processes going global, complex and highly interconnected across applications, the need for the quick turnaround to implement these changes across Business Applications has become a challenge to Information Technology teams.

 After you make these changes to the said business processes in all the affected applications, how sure are you that it works? Maybe this is an easy part of the problem. Being an incremental change, you may just do a manual test. But the problem lies elsewhere! The changes you thought you made, to a specific business process would have affected a few other processes across the process chain. In a typical large enterprise with complex interwoven processes, many of us fail to identify this impact. 

 Gone are those days, where people used to say "I am there since this application was built and I know the whole thread"! With the competitive world and the habit of changing support vendors for the applications, every two years once along with asking for a 35% cut in Support cost, all that knowledge and legacy has already walked out of your campus! Any new vendor taking support, only put a patch by looking at the few lines of code surrounding it or few Transaction codes before and after the affected process steps.

 What can be the solution to preserve that knowledge? In my opinion, Invest in Testing Automation while the project is under implementation phase and all the knowledge is still there with you.  

 Do you feel the same?