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Test automation is considered the Holy Grail of testing – saving time and supposedly resources. Agile and DevOps play a significant role in the race toward automation, yet many organizations are failing to gain the anticipated ROI.
Why? Because test automation is riddled with challenges – from skillset and tester expertise through business complexities. It is therefore no surprise that although 43% of organizations surveyed have a dedicated testing solution, 54% of business process testing is still done manually.
Automation is expensive, requires specific skillset, and is limited by business complexities
Many factors need to be taken into consideration to maximize the benefits of test automation – including planning, tool selection, and aligning with business needs. Unfortunately, there are many cases which organizations would prefer to forget – automation blunders that cost millions of dollars in losses, and plain embarrassment for some of the world’s leading tech innovators.
In 2015, Amazon Web Services cloud platform suffered an outage when its automated infrastructure processes time out. This led to a dwindling sequence of events which left AWS down for five hours. Similar outages and bugs left Google Gmail and DropBox users frantic for several hours.
In the airline industry, outages and down times can be the source of serious chaos. In 2017, Delta Air Lines grounded domestic flights after automation misconfigurations resulted in a massive system outage costing the company in over $150 million, 150 flight cancelations and thousands of angry customers.
Many more automation blunders can be seen in other industries – from government and healthcare, financial and more – large and small business alike. So what can one do to avoid these blunders? The eBook “Beyond Test Automation: Leave Nothing to Chance” tackles this very issue, uncovering five key steps that will help you evaluate and scope your test automation needs for a successful test automation project:
- How to identify the most critical business processes to test
- How to decide on the right business processes to automate
- How to assign key users, transferring and capturing their knowledge
- How to write efficient, easily maintainable test cases that reflect all business process variants
- How to make sure to only test the right things
Automating Beyond Test Execution
The benefits of test automation go beyond test case creation. Other areas of testing such as workflow, business processes, collaboration and defect management can all be automated – significantly improving testing time and quality. “Beyond Test Automation: Leave Nothing to Chance” dives into the benefits of automation beyond test execution including the important role machine learning can play in improving testing time, quality and – most importantly – avoiding front-page headlines with automation disasters.