With the advancements in technology and effective service delivery for businesses, QA and Testing service providers are moving into automation. Year 2017 has come to an end and as we step in the year 2018, it’s interesting to look at how automation testing industry are growing. Companies Trends for last few years, it has brought various advancement in the test automation field.
It’s easier to automate unit testing than system level testing, because the unit test environment is less complex. There are also a number of good testing tools (many open source) to aid unit level test automation. User acceptance testing is often not a target for automation, because this is often a formal sign off procedure with the customer. However, the ability to automate the types of tests that users want to run is helpful to ensure that user acceptance testing is likely to be successful.
Companies may think that all tests should be automated as it’s a onetime effort and provides cheaper solution rather than spend on many resources working manually. How true this thought is? Creating and maintaining automation tests do require resources along with the cost of the tools, hence the above thought may be true for some cases but not always.
Automation Testing is a great idea for projects where product is developed and needs to be Stabled. It may not be the right thing to do with new product testing. It may turn out to be costly in case bugs get overlooked by automation and are detected at a later stage. To make automation more effective, test cases for all the error scenarios have to be designed separately and this may be additional cost effort.
Automation of tests has its own side-effects as the more complex the test environment, the more maintenance the automated tests will require. This required the test environment to be set up very carefully. Otherwise lots of bug may be missed in automation thus impacting the quality.
In the end we can say that a combination of manual and automation testing may be a good approach as they alone may not prove as effective as it should be.
