What Is Automation?
Automation involves using technology to perform repetitive, monotonous tasks that would normally require human labor.
By automating repetitive, mundane jobs, employees spend less time performing them and can better focus their energies on more valuable activities; further increasing efficiency while decreasing costs at once.
Automating can be applied across a range of environments, from marketing to manufacturing. Automation can help streamline manufacturing processes with robots on assembly lines or 3D Printers automating production; lead generation and customer service automation in marketing is also used as part of automation techniques; as are payroll accounting processes as well as data analytics reporting processes in other industries.
1. Accelerated Feedback Loop
Testing new features may take longer without test automation, and test automation is one way of speeding up that feedback cycle and validating product development phases faster.
Utilizing test automation can be extremely valuable, enabling teams to detect bugs early and increase team efficiency.
2. Saving Time with Team
Your team can spend less time testing newly developed features by automating their test procedure, which facilitates communication among departments such as marketing, design or product ownership who depend on these results for communication purposes.
Logs from automated tests can easily be accessed by these departments for viewing results of these tests.
3. Reduced Business Expenses
Your company can save money using automated testing environments instead of manual ones; manual tests often have negative impacts that negatively influence projects overall.
Automated testing environments offer tremendous cost-savings opportunities when done properly and will make an enormous difference on any given project.
Implementation and configuration of an automated test environment require time and money. Furthermore, an automated testing tool might need to be purchased in order to create a safe test environment.
4. High Test Coverage
With manual testing being limited in scope and time spent writing new tests is limited, automated testing allows you to save both by writing new ones quickly.
Furthermore, automated tests increase coverage, so more features will be properly tested, resulting in increased application quality and greater coverage overall.
Automated testing also enables more intricate tests to be designed that cover more complex scenarios and run for an extended duration, something manual testing cannot usually accommodate.
5. Reusability Test Suite
Building an automated testing suite may seem intimidating at first, but once defined it becomes much simpler; you can reuse tests in other scenarios or projects with no trouble at all - easily connecting other projects with it as needed.
Assuming you possess in-depth knowledge of automating testing suites with all their associated tools, like continuous integration pipelines (CI), this will allow you to set up automated tests quickly for new projects.
6. Faster Time to Market
As previously discussed, test automation allows for continuous testing and validation of newly designed features, leading to quicker product launches by shortening testing cycles and feedback cycles.
This ultimately increases product profitability while speeding time-to-market.
7. Gain Better Insights
Automated testing offers greater insights than manual testing when some tests fail, giving better insight into why things have gone wrong than manual.
Software that has undergone automated testing not only displays insights regarding its operation but also displays data tables, files and memory contents which allows a software developer to determine where there may have been errors in development.
8. Increased Accuracy
Even experienced testing engineers can make mistakes during manual testing; faults tend to arise more commonly when testing complex use cases.
With automated tests however, accuracy can always be 100% as results always produce the same outcome.
9. Automation Testing Offers Additional Features
Automated test suites can offer additional features. For instance, they simulate thousands of virtual users interacting with your application to determine how it performs; something which manual testing simply cannot achieve.
Automated tests save developers both time and resources!
10. Less Stress on QA Team
Implementing an automated testing strategy enables your QA engineers to focus more on other tasks than manual testing; their job becomes less monotonous after manual tests have been removed from their job descriptions.
Testing automation frameworks provides quality assurance engineers the chance to develop new tools that will optimize or expand upon an already existing testing suite.
Now that we understand their benefits, let us delve deeper into different kinds of automated tests.
11. Quickly Determine the Stability of Your Build
Automating tests is the perfect way to quickly ascertain the stability of a build, whether by smoke testing or other means.
Smoke tests tend to take more time due to needing input from testing engineers for setting up database structures for smoke tests, though smoke testing might work better depending on your building type and design.
Smoke testing can also be automated using test automation software, by automatically creating and compiling databases to assess building structures rapidly and assess structural stability quickly.
Goal of this build: to verify automatically and release as quickly as possible.
12. Reduce Human Error
Humans make mistakes when performing manual testing; to save time in complex scenarios and to eliminate human error altogether it may make sense to automate tests to minimize errors during manual or automated testing sessions.
While automated tests do still sometimes produce mistakes - even with automation you could make some, but its use significantly lowers error rate compared with manual ones.
What Are the Benefits of Automation?
Automation can enhance employee morale, accuracy and reliability - three elements we will cover more closely below.
Here we outline 10 benefits of automation as outlined by Harvard.
1. Efficiency
Automation software such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Software can have an enormous effect on an organizations efficiency in many ways, from increased output and reduced expenses, to improving team collaboration and employee morale and engagement.
Some effects include:
RPA Provides Faster Processing- As opposed to human workers, RPA can complete more processes faster.
Robots Working 24-Hour Shifts Dont Sleep Or Tire Themselves Out- instead they remain vigilantly operational to manage certain operations and business tasks without human interaction - with some even scheduling certain jobs to come back tomorrow morning if something needs extra human consideration.
Analysis Collection- RPA collects all the data it performs and presents you with reports so you can evaluate them at your leisure. This allows you to discover issues with your processes that you might otherwise overlook; such as bottlenecks and inefficiencies in processes.
Increased Accuracy- RPA software can assist organizations by eliminating most human errors from processes, as it follows specific guidelines designed for compliance.
2. Productivity
Automation can bring many tangible advantages. One such benefit is increased productivity as repetitive tasks are taken over by robots who work faster and longer than humans can.
Automation can also help reduce time wasted due to "the productivity paradox." This occurs when more technology is utilized but slows processes down due to users spending their time learning, navigating, and switching among multiple applications - RPA can solve such poorly integrated technology solutions.
RPA robots may help boost production in different ways depending on their type. Two distinct RPA types have different relationships with their human counterparts.
Attended Bots -- These bots work alongside humans to complete transactions. While a human takes care of customer-focused tasks, the robot handles data entry, calculations and reporting while acting as its assistant. Although RPA with human assistance is more time consuming due to human involvement.
Unattended Bots -- Bots provide the potential to automate processes without human involvement and thus increase application in production by operating 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, increasing output significantly.
Your choice of bot depends upon your tasks and business. Some processes require human decision-making while others do not.
3. Cost Savings
Automation can provide solutions to many process related challenges by streamlining it and ultimately leading to greater productivity and reduced waste time.
Automating your business can save money in many different ways, from reduced energy usage and labor expenses, to tax savings and improved employee efficiency.
Allows workers to focus on important and creative tasks. Saving you both time and money, this strategy reduces employee time spent wasting their efforts by freeing them up for more challenging issues in your company.
Reduce or even replace portions of your salary that go toward these tasks and invest those earnings to create greater impact within your business.
4. Compliance
Businesses engaged in industries where specific standards (finance, healthcare) must be observed can take advantage of RPA to stay compliant with regulations.
RPA can assist your business by keeping it compliant.
RPA technology can assist companies with creating an effective compliance program by adding an extra level of control and oversight over processes.
RPA bots are programmed to repeat each process exactly, minimizing errors while recording their activities in an activity journal that provides you with a 100 percent accurate audit trail.
Security laws often include requirements that organizations be mindful of how their data is managed, ensuring it remains protected at all times.
5. Minimizing Errors
Errors can be expensive for businesses. By employing RPA robots instead, this risk can be greatly decreased; as each time tasks are executed the exact same way and data transfers automatically via RPA robots, errors such as typos and attention span related miscalculations are eliminated entirely.
The Fewer errors you commit, the simpler it will be for your employees to handle any potential fallout and therefore save your business both money and time when dealing with any rework needed later on.
RPA technology can also assist organizations in minimizing errors at scale by collecting data and creating reports to give an organization a clearer idea of its processes and opportunities to increase efficiency.
Read More: Definition, Methods, and Types of Software Development
6. Customer Satisfaction
Robot process automations positive influence on customers experiences with and your treatment of them are one of the greatest draws to automation for process-intensive organizations.
RPA allows you to quickly and efficiently respond to customer queries and requests more effectively and respect their time by responding at just the moment they require answers.
Once taking days or hours, this process now only requires minutes - perfect for order processing! It also has other applications in customer interaction management tools such as data collection.
Automating processes within your business will increase its reputation by garnering positive online reviews and spreading word-of-mouth advertising.
7. Increase Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Repetitive work can leave employees exhausted; RPA has proven its expertise at relieving employees of such monotonous, time-consuming tasks so they can focus their creative energies into solving more creative and critical thinking tasks instead.
Implemented correctly, workplace initiatives like these can boost efficiency, morale and productivity within an office.
Businesses often struggle to gain buy-in from those impacted by RPA technology because employees fear automation could replace them.
Once it becomes evident that RPA will not leave employees searching for work and that their existing positions can actually improve, many workers quickly become enthusiastic advocates of RPA software.
8. Eliminate Paper-Based Processes
RPA offers an eco-friendly alternative, as it digitizes processes that normally utilize paper resources into digital processes that no longer consume any resources at all.
A workflow automates processes that involve files. The system routes each document directly to those who must review and approve it before saving it in an easily searchable shared folder for safekeeping.
Through creating digital workflows for documents, your company can eliminate paper from its operations, saving both money and the environment.
9. Data Standardization, Cleaner and Consistent
Automating processes offers many advantages over manual work processes, with one key one being standardization of information handling - saving both time and resources in cleaning up past data from manual efforts.
Automating also creates consistency within information handling; eliminating time spent manually cleaning it all up before.
As part of your effort to expand your business, setting measurable objectives and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess whether your strategy is working is essential.
When dealing with human information processing there can be errors that make measuring KPIs harder while providing trustworthy measurements for trustful results.
These data sets are reliable and standardized, making it simpler for you to spot patterns within your data, diagnose any potential problems and make better decisions; implement business intelligence strategy or increase growth.
10. Scalable Processes
Your robotic and automated workforce can scale to meet the size of your company.
As your company expands, RPA allows you to easily scale with it at minimal costs. Automation enables quick adjustments based on whether it is the right time of year for your business or there has been consistent expansion.
RPA offers an adaptable solution that is customizable to your exact requirements, meeting them whenever required.
Different Types of Automated Testing
There are various kinds of automated testing. Each option may offer unique benefits when adding it to your testing, so lets look at each and discuss its use in further depth.
Test Units
A unit test is defined as any logically distinct piece of code within an application system; most programming languages utilize functions for this purpose.
While unit tests should interact with code from other tests (or with databases, configuration files or networks directly), any interactions must instead be faked by returning faked data and simulating interactions via function returns and fakeouts (for instance).
Checking logic works properly is key, not simply testing interaction.
Functional Testing
Functional testing combines unit and functional testing. When conducting functional tests, do not create false calls or simulate activity with faked log-on details or fake calls and logoff details.
Functional tests perform this conversion between input and output for comparative purposes with expected outcomes.
Regression testing
It is vitally important to conduct regression testing in order to ascertain if an applications quality has increased (or decreased).
Regression tests run every time new features are added to products; QA engineers use them to assess whether an API endpoint still manages its current load of requests or can accommodate for even more.
Smoke Testing
Quality Assurance engineers rely on smoke tests as a method for verifying whether their build has been stable before proceeding further with additional tests.
It should serve as an important preliminary confirmation step before further scrutiny occurs.
A smoke test consists of only a few tests designed to assess overall stability of construction projects and act as an initial confirmation before continuing forward with further work.
Black Box Testing
In black box testing, only input and output count as significant variables; no prior knowledge or documentation should be available to the tester; testing should focus solely on testing how easy an app is for someone unfamiliar to it to use for the first time.
Its purpose should be to see whether users find using an application intuitive enough.
Black box testing aims to detect specific errors:
- Incorrect or missing functions
- User Interface errors
- Behavior or performance errors
- Startup and termination errors
In short, black box testing is hard to automate but still a very useful type of testing to include.
Integrity Testing
An integration test is conducted by a testing engineer in order to assess whether multiple systems are compatible.
These systems could range from databases and APIs all the way up to complicated cloud services.
Integration testers might want to assess whether they can connect with Twitter API and be seen working together seamlessly; an effective integration test occurs if both products appear compatible and do not clash during testing.
Why Automate Testing
Software products are never without defects, regardless of how thoroughly every software group tests their products.
Test engineers usually discover them before going live; however even with exhaustive manual tests available today some issues still slip by unnoticed. Automation Test provides an ideal means for improving software testing processes.
An individual performs manual software testing by sitting at their computer and carefully navigating through each application screen, trying various input/usage combinations until their results match with what would be considered the expected behavior.
Manual testing should continue throughout development cycles due to changes to source code or situations like multiple OSs/hardware configurations requiring continuous manual testing.
An automated testing tool can streamline this process by playing back recorded actions, comparing them against expected behaviors and reporting back the result to engineers as quickly as manual tests do.
Furthermore, automated software tests provide ease of replicability as well as expansion to carry out tasks not possible with manual tests - smart managers realize the importance of automated software tests in successful software project development initiatives.
Automation of software testing can be an essential tool for large software development companies; however, smaller firms may find its implementation too expensive and cumbersome to justify its implementation costs.
Automated Testing Saves Time and Money
Automation of Testing Saves Both Time and Money To ensure software quality, repeated tests during development must take place frequently; software tests should take place each time source code changes are made and with each release tested with all supported operating systems and configurations.
Running these manual tests repeatedly is time consuming and expensive compared with automated ones which run faster, cheaper tests. Once created, automated ones can run repeatedly without incurring additional expenses - cutting test run times in half leading to cost reduction.
Test Coverage Is Expanded Considerably
Software testing automated can greatly boost software quality by increasing both its scope and depth of testing.
Unattended tests run long-term exams usually avoided in manual testing; multiple computers with differing configurations can even be utilized during these long tests. Testing software internally such as memory, files, data tables or file contents to see if its working as expected enables software testing automation to conduct hundreds of complex scenarios simultaneously to provide coverage unavailable with manual methods alone.
Accuracy Improved By Automated Tests
Manual testing can be tedious and even experienced testers make mistakes from time to time, which makes automated tests much faster and more accurate than manual ones in terms of results accuracy and consistency.
By eliminating repetitive manual tests altogether and recording detailed results automatically, more time can be dedicated toward creating new automated tests or exploring complex features requiring further investigation.
Automated Testing Does What Manual Tests Cannot
Manual tests cannot test an application with thousands of real users; automated tests, however, can simulate hundreds to tens of thousands of virtual users interfacing with software applications and networks simultaneously.
Automated testing benefits both developers and testers alike. Developers can leverage shared automated tests to quickly discover problems before sending code off for testing by running these automated checks automatically upon checking-in source code - they even receive notification if a test fails - saving both time and building confidence among team members.
This feature saves developers precious development hours as it boosts team collaboration.
Morale Of Both QA Team
Development teams increase when automated software testing is employed; our experience shows this clearly.
Your team members gain confidence as their skills increase over time - passing this on to their organization as a result.
Bottom Line
RPA offers many advantages to any organization, including reduced employee workload and more efficient processes.
Automating these two technologies brings benefits that surpass those offered by RPA alone.
RPA benefits extend far beyond just external considerations - they can have an enormously positive effect on employees and company culture alike.
Automating processes is one way of improving employee productivity and morale while helping businesses ensure long-term sustainability and continued operations.
