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What does automation provide?
Some companies incorrectly believe that automation is a waste of time and money, others believe that it is a great trend and “pill” for all diseases. Let’s see where the middle is and what the meaning of automation is.
How useful is automation?
This is one of quite new directions in development, surrounded by a large number of myths. Most of all businesses address automation, believing that it:
– will solve all the problems of high-quality software release;
– will allow to refuse from manual testing;
– is necessary simply because it is a “great trend”;
– will speed up the production of releases;
– will increase coverage of platforms and operating system versions during testing.
In this case, manual quality provision and automation are, as a rule, equally important and used in the complex. In addition, each project is individual, and sometimes automation is not necessary.
When is automation necessary?
– Large scale application with a lot of business features.
– Significant application lifecycle (from 1 year and more).
– Implementation of CI/CD, regular releases + small number of QA specialists.
Automation tasks
As a rule, SDET experts are engaged for solving the following tasks:
– Automation of routine and frequent checks, reducing the load on QA experts.
– Control the main application functions and track changes in the product.
– Ability to perform testing with a large number of devices, browser versions and operating systems.
– Test the application performance under conditions of simultaneous work with a large amount of data and users.
Results
Automation helps you achieve balance:
– check manually what requires human attention (usually up to 25% of cases);
– automate other cases.
At the same time, automation in the long term reduces both testing costs and risks associated with the human factor.
It is also possible to speed up releases if necessary.
For example, if you need to check about 400 cases in a development sprint, it will take up to two weeks to manually check them, and auto-tests can be done at night and analyzed in 4 hours.
The business, thanks to automation, gets the opportunity at any time to make sure that the key functions of the system work correctly and check if there are no errors (and if there are, then what they are).