In this fast-evolving world, technology has also grown with lightning speed with a variety of new technologies as the requirement of the customer changes frequently so in order to deliver a quality product and save time new methodologies came into the picture, so is the case with software testing.
Earlier software testing was bound to manual testing but now slowly as the technology is growing Automation testing has come into the picture which has become a boom in the market. The reason behind the Test Automation was due to rapidly changing consumers requirement there it was very difficult to deliver a good quality product within the specified amount of time. Test Automation was prepared to reduce the human efforts for doing the repetitive task. Test Automation is nothing but a smart way of testing an application with the intention to maximize the quality of the software by writing scripts using a programming Language on some tool.
Pros and Cons of Software Test Automation
Once it comes to automation there are many strengths and weaknesses we can find. Below Listed are some pros and cons of automation that an organization faces in day to day testing.
Pros of Software Test Automation
- Speed & Time: Speed plays an important role during the development and testing of software, with automation testing we can speed up the testing process by writing automation scripts that provide rapidness in the work when compared to the human efforts. Time is also important and should be taken in account and when it comes to regression testing automation plays a major role as regression testing comprises a set of repetitive tasks that are automated with the help of tools by writing scripts in order to save time and money.
- Reduces labour cost: Automation testing can also be performed in various phases of software development so it is easy for the organization to reduce the cost by replacing the manual testers with an automation engineer for the same task to be done with a small piece of code.
- Elimination of Human Error: As we know the error is something that is frequently done by humans, missing a single test case or scenario may lead to irrelevant results and may compromise the quality of the product, but automation testing takes the human factor out of the testing and ensures for more accurate results.
- High Accuracy: Accuracy is a must factor when it comes to software testing, tests must be accurate enough so that there is no logical mistakes automation testing ensures accuracy by asserting the actual results with expected results.
- Reusable TestScripts: Tests scripts written in automation testing are reusable in nature we can use those for testing of similar applications also.
- Performance Tests: Performance testing becomes impractical with manual testing as we test the application with a high number of end-users which is not practical, while automation Testing provides facilities for performance testing as well with the help of tools like Jmeter, load runner etc.
- Batch execution: Batch execution is a time taking process in manual testing as we need to test the application in batches for highly accurate results, but with automation testing by following a suitable framework that is compatible with the tool batch execution can be done in much lesser time.
- Data-Driven Testing: Data-Driven testing is a time taking process in manual testing as we need to test the application with multiple sets of data, but with automation testing, by following a data-driven approach we can achieve data-driven testing in much less time.
Cons of Software Test Automation
- Tool Selection: Test Automation can be achieved with a variety of tools so it becomes difficult to choose between the tools that suit your business requirements and most Important must be budget-friendly.
- How Far Can we Automate: 100% automation is not possible, so one should plan thoroughly what features need to be and how much automation is possible in those features following which a Test Plan must be made.
- False Positive & False Negative: False Positive is a scenario in which the system functions fine but the script shows the other way which may waste the time of the Test Engineer, while in False-negative the script pretends the system is functioning properly but the system isn’t this happens generally due to the abruption of test environment settings by a network issue.
- Lack of Knowledge: Programming knowledge is a must for automation testing on can directly Jump by simply knowing the functionality of the application as the scripts are majorly written using some programming language within a framework standard.
- Frequently changing GUI content: In this rapidly changing environment, the requirement of the clients also keeps changing which creates problems and may fail the script if the user interface of the application changes frequently which simply waste the time of the test engineer.
- Exploratory Testing: Yes Exploratory testing should be kept in mind as well which emphasises on testing the application randomly without following any requirements and thus it becomes impractical for an automation tool to do Exploratory testing as the tests are performed in some manner rather than random execution.
- Cost & Maintenance: The initial investment is quite high for the resources and sometimes we may have to go for commercial tools which increase the cost of testing the application while talking about the maintenance through automation allows reusability of the scripts but sometimes due to frequently changing requirements, maintaining the code becomes very difficult.
