Your organization’s testing needs grow with each succeeding release of an application, adding to the amount of time and resources needed to manually test features that may have been changed or altered. That’s a large part of what makes regression testing such a natural candidate for automation.
Without it, quality assurance processes can become strained, schedules for other new projects are often impacted, and all too often, regression testing is cut back in favor of delivering new features within a project schedule. That leaves undiscovered defects caused by new code development, causing damage to existing functionality.
The solution to quality, faster regression testing is to automate with these key steps:
- Take an inventory of the critical workflow and functionality within the system
- Transform the workflow into test cases and scripts
- Automate the execution of test scripts using an advanced automation tool
- Use the test results as inputs to management’s business risk analyses
- Maintain and version-control the test cases/scripts as software assets
The kind of ROI you experience through automated testing (regression and otherwise) will vary, but will most always include the following:
Cost and Time savings – Be prepared to provide an up-front investment to automate your regression testing for the tools, planning and creation of the test cases. You will make that money back in time and manpower savings. Because automation is faster than manual testing, you will get to market sooner and be able to deliver products quicker.
Repeatability – Although occasional adjustments are needed due to changes, automated tests are essentially executed precisely the same way every time they are executed. This might not seem like a big return, but consider how many steps would need to be executed manually if these tests were not present and then consider how many mistakes might be made with that effort.
Traceability – Automated tests (usually) provide some type of evidence of execution. It could be a traditional log or a simple pass/fail output from execution, but either way, automated tests can keep better track of what was measured during execution and provide the data with less variation than a manual tester.
Availability – Automated tests can be kicked off manually or automatically to run at any hour of the day. They don’t get tired, sick, or take vacations, and they can be made to work weekends without special arrangements.
Discover the potential ROI impact for your project with the GlobalNow ROI Calculator.
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