Software companies looking to make the most money out of their applications, sooner or later are going to move over to automated testing. Why? Simply because it makes more sense than manual testing and provides a much higher-level of return on investment than manual testing. We’ve got a quick breakdown of the advantages of automated testing for you:
• Cost reductions. This is the big one. Running a regular testing cycle costs money when you’re doing it by hand. The more times you do it – the more resources you have to commit. That’s expensive and it doesn’t make sense when you can write a test once and then execute it as many times as you like with an automated system.
• Time saving. Manual testing is also time consuming. A unit-test run by a machine takes less than a second to execute. If you’re using people to do your testing they simply can’t match that kind of speed. When you look at the regular execution of test suites, the time savings can run into hundreds if not thousands of man hours.
• Greater accuracy. You want to be sure that you catch every possible flaw through your testing. Manual testing introduces human error into the testing process. You end up with a large chunk of false positives and false negatives because people aren’t perfect and they can’t consistently execute test suites time after time. This doesn’t happen with automated testing – the test case is executed the same way each and every time.
• Greater code coverage. Once you’ve got your people away from the grind of running endless tests they have more time available to write tests. This means that you can test more and more of your application at every phase of testing because the automated testing is taking care of the grunt work.
• A boost to developer’s confidence. It’s not a minor benefit. When developers feel they can fully trust the code they’ve written, they’ll be more able to experiment and use innovation on your behalf because they know any problems will be caught early and fixed early. This can be a powerful creative force for any software house.
• Cuts down on QA. If you find your problems and fix them early, then the QA team won’t have their hands full at the end of a release cycle. They’ll be able to concentrate on finding and fixing a few flaws rather than hundreds.