Underestimated Benefits of Automated Testing

Today every software developer recognizes the importance and necessity of testing services and quality assurance (QA). Increasingly, creators of the new software appeal to a test lab to perform the relevant checks. But there is also a trend of increasing the popularity of manual testing and underestimating of automated testing.

This is due to the fact that a small project, according to the creators, contains as little code that it seems that automation, in this case, is simply de trop. Of course, none wants to spend extra money from the budget for the unnecessary work. If the software is really small, in some cases, there is really no reason to implement the automation, but eventually every project grows, and, accordingly, its code is also growing. Unfortunately, manual testing may not always be the only effective approach for QA, as the volume of work may be too large.

Let's imagine that a tester must manually verify for example the registration or authorization stage on the site or application. For this purpose it is necessary to enter all the required data, starting from the first and last name, and ending with the email address and password. There is a very large number of scenarios during the user authorization in the system - the correct or incorrect data, entering special characters, valid or invalid email address, existing or non-existent domain, password with sufficient or insufficient number of characters, valid or invalid date of birth and so on. Testing each of the options, tester will spend a lot of time, and it also should be taken into account that there may be several builds, as well as a range of devices, browsers, operating systems and other technical conditions.

On the other end of the scale we have the automated testing, through which the tester can program a specific user behavior and run this test on different devices. Reducing time spent is evident. Moreover, test scripts can be automated in a variety of testing methodologies - for unit testing, integration testing, system testing, functional testing, multi-platform testing and so on - the list is very long.

Of course, it is not worth to consider automated testing a panacea for all the problems, because not all program bugs can be detected through its application, but this technique simply has significant advantages compared to manual testing.

The first, and for some projects with a limited budget, the decisive advantage of automation is its cheapness compared to manual check. Hourly automators' work, of course, is more expensive than the manual, but after all, as people say, miser pays twice. One hour of automatization and running the test could in the end be equal to the dozens of hours of manual work of a whole test lab team. By the way, if the release date of the project is already on the wane, and developers have very little time for the check, then the automation will be more beneficial solution.

Many resort to automated testing because of its infallibility. It was truly noticed that when the tester sits hour after hour, day after day passing the monotonous and tedious tests manually, some errors can be undetected. Automated tests are free from human factor - no error will sneak into a system after the programmed behavior, carefully inspecting a particular system function.

 Another significant advantage of automated testing is that if developers plan to continue developing and adding new features to the project, or in the future the similar by operation program will be created, then the once automated tests are reusable for different software. And even if the automated script will require some minor changes, it is still much less time required for its correction and running than for manual checks.

Sometimes it happens that the creators of the project for which automation was applied before send the test lab a new project, just a little bit different from the previous one, but it does not have the technical documentation. In such a case it is not obligatory to order the black box testing - to find the automated tests and their results for the previous project will be enough for bridging the gap in documentation.

 In the end, no one can dispute such an advantage of automation for QA as the ability to alter the code for improving the system performance. Thus, you can save time and efforts and not to remake rather large parts of the program.

 In conclusion, we can say that some points in the system operation are just impossible to be checked manually, e.g. load testing or stress testing. Really, the test lab team could hardly create the appearance of fifty thousand users on the site or to simulate simultaneous download of twenty thousand songs. Therefore, even if the project is not very big, do not underestimate the benefits of automated testing - perhaps by investing money in this service once, the results will show positive results repeatedly.