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Again?
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Contact usNow may be the right time to adopt automated testing to help your QA engineers detect things that often go unnoticed. We know you’ve been putting this off for a while, either because automation takes too much time or you thought you didn’t need it. But post-release backtracking isn’t fun, huh?
If you’re involved in the software industry, test automation is your moonshot goal.
Aside from the tangible benefits to the development lifecycle, software test automation pays off in monetary terms. Explore what they are for your business and what goes into the return on investment (ROI) of automating your tests.
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There’s a misconception that test automation is only for medium-sized and large companies, as they have too many projects, builds, and resources to skip it.
But it doesn’t work that way. If you’re a startup with a single project to focus on, you don’t want to deliver bug-filled software to users or waste your development time any more than companies larger than yours do. Regressions happen, and things break, whether you run one or dozens of projects.
Implementing automated software testing boils down to whether you’re all for quality. You can’t afford to chug along with manual tests when automation offers so many benefits. Let’s take a look at the most crucial of these.
For testers, floundering through uncharted waters is as common as creating test scenarios. But when they write tests for something they aren’t good at, the likelihood of bugs in production increases astronomically.
Here comes the selling point of test automation vs. manual testing. When your software is tested automatically, modules are checked with unerring accuracy. So even if your engineers or testers have a bad day, there’s something that has their backs.
You don’t do backups manually, right? You’ve automated them to save time by not doing the same thing every evening for the rest of your life.
Test automation is also about saving time. It allows your quality assurance (QA) team to spend more hours checking for issues that can only be checked manually while taking the humdrum routine off their hands. Integration, regression, and web application penetration testing can all be automated to save your testers’ hours.
Every bug, change, or software enhancement pushes your release date back.
While it can’t speed up the coding stage, test automation can help you get through change verification outside the restrictions of an 8-hour day. You can adopt multiple automated software testing methods to run checks simultaneously and roll out your product on time.
What may seem a minor error at the design stage can be a disaster waiting to happen post-release. The cost of troubleshooting bugs is always higher as you move to the next development stage.
That’s where you can reap test automation cost savings by catching and fixing bugs early in your development process. Automated tests can cover larger chunks of code than manual ones, improving the way your QA team detects errors.
If you suspect your testers are exhausted because of the never-ending flow of projects and tasks, automation is your way to retain them.
Automation is a huge help for your QA team. It makes it easier for your testers to get the job done, stopping them from leaving due to burnout. What this means to your company is you won’t need to bear the cost of losing talent.
You can’t spend a single dollar of your business budget without knowing whether it’ll come in later. (Okay, you can, but that doesn’t make you a good decision-maker.)
Before any amount goes out, you need to have at least a ballpark figure supporting your decision to invest it. In other words, you should be clued in on the return you can expect.
Test automation ROI shows just that. It’s a metric that gives you a numerical representation of the return you can get by embedding an automation strategy into your QA workflows.
Having automated testing ROI figures at your fingertips helps determine whether investing in automation is financially feasible for your business. This involves weighing the gains and loss risks for your short-term and long-term software testing needs.
Here’s what else ROI means in automation testing:
So how can you calculate it? Let’s look at the formula.
The first thing to do is to make sense of the test automation ROI formula. To use it, you’ll need a couple of numbers:
There’s no fixed amount of money you can feed into your calculations for investment benefits and costs. Even if you aren’t a math person, brace yourself for adding figures up on your own.
To calculate investment benefits, tally up all the savings and reduced risks associated with adopting automation. They include:
Investment costs are what you’ll need to pump into your QA processes to get started on automation. Think of:
Once you’ve calculated investment benefits and costs, you can follow the formula to figure out automated testing ROI in three steps:
You’ve just reckoned a percentage showing your expected return on embracing an automation strategy.
If you’re confused, you can get Relevant to do the calculations for your business. Just contact us, and we’ll discuss the details.
It may seem easy to get your hands on your total payrolls and calculate how much you can save on salaries with test automation. For example, if you pay $23 per hour to have a manual tester hunt down regressions, you may think you can now spend $184 less per day to get the job done.
However, like with other test automation metrics, there’s more to ROI than meets the eye. When quantifying investment benefits and costs, you need to calculate all changes that automation may bring to your workflows. On top of that, it doesn’t mean you can give your manual testers the sack, as some test cases must still be handled manually.
To go beyond the obvious in testing ROI calculations, you need to factor in:
If your cost-benefit analysis shows you’re in the black after calculating all that, automation may be a rewarding long-term strategy for your business.
Basic math skills should suffice to quantify the ROI of IT and software testing projects. Still, calculating it for automation isn’t without challenges because:
With that, accurate ROI calculations require a deeper dive into your company than just replacing formula components with your payroll numbers.
To wrap up, you don’t label automated testing ROI as a fact or fiction. It’s a proven metric for assessing the efficiency of automated tests in QA processes, although calculating it can be tricky. And putting a monetary value upon it is even harder when you build your own team of in-house automation testers.
The good news is that you can take the easy route with Relevant. As your remote team, our QA specialists can set up automated workflows and maximize test automation ROI for your business.
Whether you want to shift your testing to the left or hire remote developers, contact Relevant to move things further.
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