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Key Advantages and Disadvantages of Automation Testing: the Ultimate Guide
Automation testing is a great way to facilitate a variety of QA-related processes in product development. Whether you’re working on a small- or large-scale project, having an outsourced specialist is always a great idea as they can give proper recommendations on implementing automated solutions tailored to your business needs.
But are there any pitfalls of using automation testing in particular cases? In this article, we’ll discuss the most common benefits of automation testing over manual testing and how it can help your company optimize multiple product development processes. Keep reading to find answers to these and other questions — you’ll find some interesting insights here!
What is Automation Testing
Automation testing helps facilitate manual tests and replace particular kinds of them with a series of automated checks. Some of the primary functional purposes of automation testing include (obviously) running tests and automating them, analyzing results and reporting them, preparing and deploying the test environment, generating test data, and managing the test suite.
What types of tests are there?
There are various classifications of automation testing. For instance, the following:
- specifics of tests (smoke, performance, integration, regression tests, etc.),
- types of testing (functional that test how a particular feature works and non-functional that analyses your product’s security, efficiency, etc.),
- phases of testing (unit, API, and UI tests).
Depending on what your product needs, you can easily gather a team experienced with relevant types of tests.
Use cases of automated testing
As for the use cases of automation testing services, you can try and implement them for different situations. For example, use it to automate regression testing and check if all the functions of your website or mobile app work properly after the new update or feature release.
Plus, automated tests can help you cover repeated tests you have to run from release to release. As you see, the benefits of automation testing are quite extensive.
Another use case example for automated testing is checking the productivity of your solution. This is a great option if you need to test how well your product works under various load volumes. You can model the test environment with any amount of users trying your app or website at the same time. Such types of tests, like performance checks, should be carried out automatically as there are no equivalent alternative manual tools.
Of course, many businesses stick to manual testing, especially in the early stages of the company’s life cycle. However, implementing automated solutions will only bring more help to the whole process of software development. The range of automation testing tools is vast, and you can pick the ones that fit your specific needs. Plus, your QA team can use all of its imagination and creativity while setting up a tool stack to use ad implement for your particular project.
The key goals of automation testing
Speaking of the critical tasks and goals automation testing has to complete no matter what the project is about, it’s essential to highlight the following:
- Time-effectiveness of your team
Automation testing helps improve the code quality and its accuracy together with the development speed. With its help, you can spare more time on a detailed manual check of complex scenarios or allocate these resources to more prioritized tasks;
- Greater test coverage
Automated testing covers more types of checks through smaller time spans. It’s also a better option for running more extensive, complicated tests that are pretty hard for manual running. Automation testing will complete such checks with no human intrusion. Plus, it gives you an opportunity to focus on future tasks, accelerate, and improve the development process;
- High level of testing accuracy
To avoid human-made mistakes during manual testing, better implement automated checks for your app or software. It will diminish operational risks, enhance the overall efficiency and result accuracy, and save time spent on both testing and improving mistakes.
The differences between automation and manual testing
Clearly, automation testing is different from manual. Here’s a quick recap on the main differences between automation and manual testing:
- Manual checks are quite time-consuming since everything’s done by hand. Compared to it, automation testing is more time-effective thanks to using specialized software that takes care of any kind of tests you need;
- Manual checks cost less in the short-term perspective, while automated testing prices may be pretty high in the beginning yet become more reasonable and efficient in the future;
- The chances of making a mistake are pretty high when you’re running manual tests, while with automation, it’s close to zero;
- Manual tests require significant human resources and multiple teammates to complete tasks for every stage of testing. At the same time, automated checks require fewer people involved and encompass a higher volume of test cases.
| Manual testing | Automation Testing | |
|---|---|---|
| Speed of implementation and execution | Low | Fast |
| Cost of testing | Expensive in the long-term | Expensive in the short-term |
| Probability of making a mistake | High | Low |
| Need for human interference | High | Low |
Advantages of Automation Over Manual Testing
Now you know what automation testing is and how it differentiates from manual QA. So, it’s time to look through the key perks and pitfalls you can face while implementing automation testing in the product development process. Let’s start with the advantages of automation testing.
Better scalability
One of the main benefits of automation testing is that you can implement it on different configurations and devices. Hence, it’s much easier to test a wider variety of aspects and things simultaneously. This comes in handy when your product runs on multiple operating systems, browsers, or devices. This way, you can compare testing results at once and see if your app or software works properly in every case.
Higher effectiveness
Since automation minimizes human intrusion in the testing process, it helps increase the efficiency of your whole team and focus on other, more important tasks they can perform manually. Plus, you can set up the CI (continuous integration) system that will automatically run and analyze the test results once you add a new update or feature to your product. This will ensure every issue you’ve got in the newly-released change will definitely be resolved.
Better accuracy
With no manual resources required for test running and result analysis, automated testing helps minimize human error in the process. In addition, it allows you to run these tests more frequently and in greater amounts, which is extremely helpful if you’re using huge databases for product development or need to add new features. Plus, with automation testing, you can be sure the system will quickly identify and fix issues that might occur throughout the process.
Improved collaboration between product developers
Together with improving testing accuracy, automation also improves cooperation in your development team. For example, with a set of computerized software checks, your teammates responsible for the app or web development can simply get them running and work on implementing new features or releasing updates at the same time. This way, your team receives a broad code coverage and helps minimize the error risk in the recently implemented code.
More reliable test results
Thanks to automation testing, you can run multiple tests more frequently. Hence, it allows you to get more up-to-date, relevant test results, identify, and fix any error that occurs faster than if you were running these checks manually. This works both for the existing code and errors in it and the newly added one.
Faster test completion
Automation testing allows you to run and complete both functional and non-functional software checks way faster than manual ones. The main point of this type of testing is concurrent execution which means you’ll be able to run more tests within shorter periods of time.
Cost reduction
Once you hire or outsource an automation testing team, you decrease the need for manual testers. Plus, you reduce the time required to run multiple tests, which also helps you save a substantial amount of your budget. Apart from this, automated testing can help decrease costs on software development and product support as the tools you implement for this type of testing require less time and effort to identify and fix bugs.
Disadvantages of Automation Testing
Although implementing automation testing is quite helpful for different types of projects, there are some pitfalls you need to take into account. Therefore, we’ve prepared a quick list of the key disadvantages of automation testing.
Too expensive for small-scale projects
Automation testing tools vary from project to project, but most of them still are pretty expensive. Hence, this may significantly increase the overall testing cost for a business. Although automation testing tools are a good investment in the long-term perspective, it’s not the most convenient option for smaller companies that can’t afford trusted, high-quality testing tools, so implementing automation QA will require proper project planning.
Testing tool limitations
Lots of businesses believe that, after implementing automated testing in their product development, they’ll get full test coverage for their apps or software. However, every tool you want to use has its own limitations. Hence, the automation process won’t be 100% complete anyway, so you don’t need to set too high expectations regarding the automation capabilities of your teams and the tools you’re about to use.
Lack of human factor
The user experience has the ultimate value for getting first-hand feedback regarding your product’s interface, functionality, and convenience. However, automated testing doesn’t require any human interference to test your app or software. That’s why it’s more complicated to get a better understanding of how helpful, good-looking, and clear the visual interface aspects are.
Since the test scenario always goes the way you set it up, it may miss some mistakes that could be obvious for a manual tester. So, this inability to encounter all the errors may result in creating poor UI and UX for your customers, which will negatively affect your product’s popularity and trustworthiness after the release.
Not applicable for GUI testing
One of the disadvantages of automation testing is that most types of such tests usually check the functionality and performance of your software or mobile app, but you can’t use them for checking graphics or audio files. This happens because of the textual descriptions automation testing tools used to ascertain the output. That’s why, even if all the content you want to check is correct, the test tool will probably crash every time you try to launch a quality check.
Not universal for different environments
Although automation testing doesn’t require human intrusion while checking the software, you’ll still need someone to make tools work efficiently in between. If you need to change in a particular test environment, you also have to update the tests you run there to make sure they work well. Therefore, you’ll have to change the test scripts in a number of locations: the CI system and local development and production environments.
Bottom Line
Automation testing is extremely helpful if you need manual resources for tasks that require more of a human factor to perform. It’s a great thing to implement to save time, increase data accuracy, get proper testing coverage, and avoid mistakes your teammates can make while running these tests manually. So, the advantages of automation testing are vast and helpful in various cases.
However, you shouldn’t neglect the value of manual testing too. There should be room for both automated and manual tests as the former helps save resources and broaden your testing strategies. In contrast, the latter can help understand the issues and analyze them from different viewpoints.
If you’re looking for automated testing experts that can be of great help to your manual QA team, Savarian.tech is the right choice for you. We are flexible on the terms and can gather a team from scratch that will ensure timely, high-quality task completion. Our team can also help you optimize the usage of both manual and automated testing to reach the best results. If you feel we could be a perfect fit, drop us a line, and we will reach out to you to discuss more!
