Top Benefits of Test Automation in Product Development and QA
For quality assurance teams and in product development, ensuring the quality and functionality of connected products is essential. Among the techniques employed to ascertain product quality, automated testing stands out as a key driver in enhancing connected product development processes. Let's then look at the eight top benefits of automated testing, which significantly contribute to improved efficiency, accuracy, and speed in the end-to-end product development cycle.
The Eight Key Benefits of Automated Testing
- Enhanced Efficiency and Speed: Automated testing significantly accelerates the testing phase by executing repetitive test cases swiftly. This expedited feedback loop is crucial for the quick identification and resolution of defects, ensuring the product's readiness for deployment is ascertained promptly.
- Improved Accuracy: The accuracy of automated testing is considerably enhanced by the reduction in the natural human variation in approach that is common in manual testing. This ensures reliable and consistent results across different test runs, facilitating a more accurate evaluation of product performance and functionality.
- Expanded Test Coverage: Increased test coverage is a hallmark of automated testing. It aids in identifying issues that might be overlooked during manual testing. This expanded coverage, therefore, significantly contributes to improving quality, ensuring that the delivered product is robust.
- Continuous Testing Capability: The 24/7 testing capability of automated testing tools allows for continuous testing, even in the event of new product versions and firmware being released. This constant testing ensures that the connected product is bug-free and performs optimally at all times.
- Reusable Test Sequences: Test sequences or scripts, once created, can be reused across various devices, form factors, and even different tests. This reusability not only saves time and effort but also enhances the consistency and efficiency of the product testing process.
- Cross-Platform Testing: Automated testing facilitates the execution of the exact same tests on multiple platforms or product variations simultaneously. This is invaluable in detecting any discrepancies across different platforms, providing critical insights into product performance and ensuring uniform functionality.
- Early Bug Detection: By employing regression test suites on every firmware commit or pull request, automated testing enables the early identification of bugs and merge problems. This timely detection reduces the debugging and fixing time, significantly accelerating the development process.
- Cost Reduction: Transitioning from manual to automated testing can break the cycle of lengthy product release schedules and increased regression testing. This transition facilitates more frequent firmware deployments and faster delivery to customers, ultimately leading to a reduction in overall testing costs and an increase in customer satisfaction.
The evolution of automated product testing within the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines further exemplifies automation's increasing role in modern product development environments. Moreover, the growing trend of automated testing adoption, as depicted by the majority of organisations are now automating oat least a third of their testing tasks, underscores the shifting paradigm towards a hybrid (manual and automated) testing approach.
The benefits of automated testing extend beyond merely speeding up the testing process. It is a comprehensive approach that augments the accuracy, efficiency, and effectiveness of product testing, playing a pivotal role in delivering high-quality connected products. As organisations continue to navigate the nuanced landscape of product development, the adoption of automated testing emerges as a prudent strategy to stay competitive and ensure the delivery of reliable connected products.
Efficient Automated Testing Solutions
By establishing an integrated environment for automated testing, and looking at the key advantages of automation and especially utilising the latest codeless automation platforms, time-to-market can be increased and scaled in a highly cost-effective manner. Ultimately, better product performance, user acceptance and satisfaction saves businesses time and money and builds brand reputation.
To find out more, please contact Nextgen today on +44 3331 120 000.