Software testing is an important step in the development cycle that helps ensure applications are bug-free and meet expectations. Manual software testing is often tedious, time-consuming, and expensive, especially in DevOps development cycles that require early and frequent testing.
Automating these tests can help reduce these headaches while improving the speed and quality of releases. This post will discuss automated testing benefits and explain how to simplify test automation with low-code solutions.
The biggest automated testing benefits include:
Automation allows you to increase your test coverage without increasing testing time. With manual testing, organizations may skip some of the lengthier or more complicated tests to save time or because their testers don’t have the bandwidth. Test automation can execute thousands of test cases quickly and with little human interaction, making it easier to run comprehensive tests without slowing development. Plus, automated tests can run unattended, freeing testers to tackle workflows requiring a human touch.
In a DevOps development cycle, the same tests should be run on every iteration of the feature or application. The software should also be tested – using the same testing methodology – on every supported operating system or browser version. With manual testing, it’s difficult to ensure that the same tests are run identically in every environment and release. Automated testing allows you to reuse the same test cases repeatedly to guarantee consistency.
DevOps practitioners often talk about “shifting left,” which means testing software early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), improving overall quality by finding and fixing defects as quickly as possible. Continuous testing takes things a step further by running automated tests continually at each stage of the SDLC. Automated continuous testing enables practices like continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), guaranteeing faster, high-quality releases with fewer bugs.
Manual software testing is a long and tedious process. Even the best testers could lose focus and make mistakes, allowing bugs to slip through the cracks and slow down the development cycle. Automation is a key tool for reducing human error because robotic testing solutions don’t get tired or distracted during long testing runs. Machines are also more adept at sorting through data, so automated testing may find defects that a human tester would miss.
Time is money, as the saying goes, and time reduction is one of the biggest automated testing benefits. Automated tests are often much faster than manual testing, and you can conduct more tests with fewer analysts. In addition, finding defects early in the SDLC reduces development time and gets software out the door faster, improving the overall ROI.
The automation skills gap is one of the biggest barriers to adopting automated testing because many test automation solutions are complicated and require a high level of expertise to use effectively. Low-code automated testing solutions are a way for less experienced teams to take advantage of automated testing benefits. Low-code testing tools give users a simplified interface from which to create automated test cases while still providing access to the underlying code. Low-code has a shallower learning curve but allows you to extend and customize your automated testing suite.
For example, Copado Robotic Testing is a low-code, AI-driven test automation tool capable of supporting any software project. Copado’s automated testing solution is simple enough to be configured in minutes but powerful enough to test across any cloud, platform, browser, or device for full test coverage.
To learn more about automated testing benefits with low-code solutions, contact Copado Robotic Testing.