Speed, frequency, quantity, quality: automating functional tests has many advantages to secure your business.
Mr Suricate shows you how this can be a long-term investment.
The vast majority of tests are performed manually by development teams (developers, testers, etc.), who check that everything is working properly by themselves by performing what are called manual tests. But some tests, especially functional tests, can be automated. This means that they are executed without the intervention of a human being, but via "robots", from a set of specifications established beforehand. The choice between manual and automated tests then depends on several criteria related to the project itself and to organizational constraints, but opting for test automation brings considerable benefits that should not be overlooked. Here are 5 of them.
1. Improve the Move To Prod
The faster the validation tasks are performed, the more you have a clearer picture of the quality of your applications, which allows you to go into production faster. And if you go into production faster, you reduce your Time To Market, i.e. the time it takes to get your product to market. This is an important asset to differentiate yourself from your competitors by deploying expected functionalities more quickly.
Improving the Move To prod with optimal quality is an indispensable constant in Agile where increments must be released regularly. Integrating automation into a continuous integration and deployment chain is therefore not an option.
2. Save time
One of the most impactful benefits of automation is the reduction of the time needed to execute tests. Some tests can take several hours when they are done manually, whereas a robot can do them in a few minutes when we allow the parallelization by hundreds of executions. It is recommended to automate the most recurrent and repetitive tests, such as non-regression tests and acceptance tests.
For example, at Mr Suricatein 2021, we completed 10,741,424 scenario executions, with an average of 3.7 minutes per execution. This equates to 27,600 days, or 75 years of manual testing saved to all of our clients combined over the year.
3. Discharge the technical teams
With the automation of repetitive validation tasks, technical teams are freed from some of the testing and can focus on incident analysis and correction. They can focus on other value-added tasks, such as validating upcoming releases, creating test cases from requirements with the team, executing more complex manual tests and implementing new automated tests.
4. Ensure consistent coverage
Good testing practice is to test early and everywhere. But in reality, it's more complicated. Not all features can be manually checked at every release, only the most critical ones. With automation, you can set up tests at every fix, update, deployment. And they can be executed as early in the process as possible, from the design of the web project to its production launch, and even beyond. This ensures constant feature coverage.
5. Improve the quality of the tests
Mistakes are human and it is often on repetitive tasks that they are made, due to lack of concentration or weariness. The automation of functional tests avoids this kind of bias, by offering complete and identical tests, bringing a gain in terms of quality. Nevertheless, it is important to combine the two, by implementing checks by human teams when the execution of a test scenario fails, to ensure that these are real anomalies and not false positives.
To also avoid the " pesticide principle ", it is also relevant to monitor and regularly evolve the test data used to cover more cases.
To conclude, the ROI of automation is not to be demonstrated in the long term, but it is an " investment " because the entry cost is important and will require a real automation strategy to choose the right tool and implement the right technical architecture and team processes.
But that will be in a future episode!
