Although organizations across the globe have embraced Agile and DevOps forms of development to keep pace with rapidly changing market dynamics, software testing still remains the most manual-driven process. Though business leaders have realized the importance of test automation, they often hesitate to invest in test automation considering it as a technical debt.
In this blog, we’ll discuss how to create a business case for test automation to secure sign off from the business leaders.
- Test automation enables Devops
Organizations have embraced DevOps form of development model to deliver value to address business challenges due to market dynamics, competitive pressures and business turbulence. DevOps enables release of new features on a weekly, daily, or nightly basis to accommodate evolving business needs. However, without test automation realizing benefits from DevOps is unrealistic. This is evident from the Gitlab DevSecOps 2021 Survey that suggests manual testing as the biggest hurdle to achieving a successful DevOps process.
Here’s how test automation can help:
Regression testing is a testing type that needs to be performed to validate that a code change has not adversely affected existing features. While following Agile & DevOps, you need to execute regression testing on a weekly/daily/nightly basis. Test automation is the only way that enables QA teams to release with confidence at an accelerated pace.
- Test automation ensures adequate coverage
While using manual testing approaches, there’s no logical way to ensure adequate coverage. Testers often create test cases based on the guesses of how end users interact with the application. In this way, they can only cover limited end users scenarios. Limited coverage could end up leaking bugs in the production environment. This can be a very costly affair for your business. As per IBM, the cost of fixing bugs in production is 15X greater than it is earlier in the development cycle.
Here’s how test automation can help:
Test automation ensures adequate risk coverage by limiting human intervention. Test automation logically answers questions like what to test and what not to by considering more parameters than are humanly possible to cover end users scenarios. For example, during regression testing, test automation ensures that you test what exactly is at risk.
- Return on investment
Test automation significantly reduces your testing costs. Here’s how:
Regression testing costs: If we talk of major Cloud ERP vendors, they’re rolling out updates quite frequently. Oracle rolls out updates 4X a year, SAP 2X, Salesforce 3X a year, and so on. Whenever an update is rolled out, you need to execute regression testing. For ease of understanding, let’s consider a case of Oracle Cloud quarterly updates. Each Oracle update requires at least 2 rounds of regression testing. Thus, you need to test at least 8X a year.
By incorporating automation testing solutions, you can easily keep pace with the frequency of ERP updates. Furthermore, test automation doesn’t require exhaustive involvement of business users in testing, freeing them up for more critical jobs.
Application downtime costs: Smooth running of enterprise applications is critical for business continuity. However, inadequate coverage and manual errors can lead to bug leakage into production, causing serious application downtime. ITIC 2021 survey states that a single hour of application downtime can result in $300,000 in lost business.
Test automation eliminates the risks of application downtime by ensuring adequate coverage. Furthermore, it also speeds up the testing process while enabling QA teams to roll out ERP updates more frequently. All this significantly contributes towards positive ROI.
