Test Automation, widely adopted within the software industry, offers numerous benefits that address the shortcomings of manual testing. Although reliable to some extent, manual testing processes often prove to be error-prone, time-consuming and limit the scope of what can be achieved. It frees teams to focus on their best work, provides a safety net through automated regression tests, and offers early and frequent feedback, facilitating rapid iteration and improvement.
Now, the question arises: What benefits are you looking to achieve? Which of these benefits is most important to you, and what drives your consideration for automation?
By drilling down into each benefit, performing a thorough analysis, and transforming them into tangible objectives, you can create a solid foundation for your automation initiative.
For each objective, you can drill down, perform analysis and readily turn them into tangible statements, from which you can form quantified objectives. As an example:
Challenge: The end-to-end, business-facing tests take three weeks to execute for each cycle. It is slowing the full delivery process.
Quantified Objective: Reduce the test execution time with the current tests to less than a day.
We advise focusing on objectives rather than existing tools, team capability or other factors.
Test Automation has been around for over twenty years; it is a core Agile practice widely adopted within the software industry. So, another question is why you haven’t adopted the practice until now.
There are many reasons:
For example, you are testing a packaged rather than an in-house developed solution, testing an in-house Oracle xStore Point of Sale.
Some aspects of your tests, such as components with only manual interfaces like keypads, make automation difficult.
Your organisation may have focussed on easier-to-automate testing areas, such as eCommerce testing, rather than the aspects you are responsible for.
Your qualified objectives help you to build the business case for your initiative. There are obvious benefits, such as the labour cost savings from automated execution. There are then the cascaded benefits of the saving: the business benefit of testing and feeding back regarding new functionality faster because their time has been liberated.
There is also the opportunity cost associated with not taking up the technology. If you are manually testing now, what is the cost of not acting and automating for the next year? You could continue with the same issues and persevere; the probability is that the testing demand will increase, and you will have a larger chasm to overcome.
We have extensive experience in test and test automation at IntelliQA. We have helped major retailers, acquirers and POS providers to automate Point of Sale testing, and we are excited to be working with world-leading fuel retailers on fuel payment test automation. We combine advanced test automation, robotics and specialist payment test technology to create solutions that help customers achieve their objectives.
Contact us
Please get in touch if you need support with automated payment testing solutions, and our sales team would be happy to discuss this with you. Contact us on:
+44 1707 906177 or sales@intelliqa.com
To keep up to date with our news and insights, please keep checking our website, or follow us on social media LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
Comments