First movers win?
The current trend is that first movers are investing significantly in order to take advantage of the expected annual digital revenue increases, along with cost reductions.
This is all great – building digital solutions that are constantly changing to align with supplier, customer and employee feedback is exactly what we should be striving for. More often than not, there is an Agile IT practice that is working long hours, scrambling to build robust, stable software that works beautifully. We all know that faulty software can damage a company’s image and negatively impact clients and sales, hence the understanding that we need to invest more in testing.
What does that mean though?
Typically, we throw people at the problem. We ask our operational teams to validate functionality, developers perform some testing, or we just pay someone else to do it.
Testing is not glamorous, and it comes with a with baggage, lots and lots and lots of it, in the form of hundreds of thousands of test cases. Surely more is better? We feel safety in numbers, but this is not necessarily the case, and we shouldn’t.
Enter test automation – hooray, problem solved! We’ll just automate as many of the test cases within our existing suite, run them faster, with fewer people, and everything will be great. Not so, fast forward one year – and there are mumblings and grumblings about the value, stability, coverage, additional requirements, etc. We thought this was supposed to make things easier – and why isn’t it?
What We Think
Here’s the thing, when you go down the road of investing in test automation, there are a number of opportunities that you want to take advantage of, you need to think about these, plan your approach, be realistic about targets, and most of all, be regimental about the quality of your test cases.
Test automation is not here to get rid of manual testing, it is in fact something that supplements manual testing, with the goal of supporting manual testers by freeing them up from repetitive testing cycles to focus on troubleshooting issues, exploratory testing, and other interactive activities. Your testers need the opportunity to explore and learn applications, think about approach, and plan the best ways to test to ensure that optimal coverage is achieved.
