With a lot of teams considering the move to autonomous testing or improving their existing automated testing processes, the discussion inevitably involves talking through the advantages of autonomous testing. To help simplify the discussion, here are five advantages of autonomous testing that you can discuss with your team to decide the impact your team would be able to expect from improved autonomous testing efforts.
Table of contents:
Reduced cost and effort
As most experienced software development teams know first-hand, software testing can be costly and require a lot of effort. As a result, a lot of teams have made an effort to establish some level of automated testing for their software project.
However, while some teams have done a good job of creating test coverage for their software project and setting the tests to run regularly on an automated basis, most teams are still spending a lot of time on writing tests and maintaining them over time.
To get the most cost reduction out of automating the software testing process, autonomous testing allows teams to go a step further and automate much or all of the test creation and maintenance process. For example, software testing solutions like testRigor empower teams with AI-powered tools that automatically study user behavior within the software and suggest or create the tests directly, which cuts out a huge amount of effort for the team.
Scalability
Another classic benefit of automating the testing process is improved scalability of your team and your software project, and driving deeper into autonomous testing can extend this benefit greatly.
As you already know by now, autonomous testing reduces a huge amount of manual effort for software teams. This reduction in manual effort is not only a cost savings up front, but also makes the project more scalable moving forward by reducing the expansion of overhead moving forward.
The larger the software project, often the larger the amount of testing that is needed to ensure a high level of quality in the project. With autonomous testing, you just need to ensure that your autonomous process is working well, and then apply it across your project and monitor it. The sooner you introduce it, the better, because you’ll be set up for successful, rapid scaling rather than running into a brick wall of overhead later down the road.
Better test coverage
Humans often don’t like to admit shortcomings, but anyone who has worked on software projects knows better. Again, another classic benefit of automated testing is that highly repetitive tasks that must be performed frequently have less mistakes when handled via automated process compared to humans manually performing the tasks.
Autonomous testing can extend this benefit even further, avoiding mistakes that can occur when writing tests from the start. Furthermore, if your tests are being created largely or entirely by an autonomous testing process, you can apply that automated process more broadly and gain a wider range of test coverage, rather than needing to go through the discussion of how much test coverage is needed or how you want more coverage but might not have the resources for it. With autonomous testing, the marginal effort for additional coverage is a lot lower.
Finally, when it comes to test coverage, a lot of people who start working with autonomous testing find that the process suggests or creates tests that they might have overlooked at times or wouldn’t have normally realized to cover. No one is perfect, and we all bring some level of biases and behavioral patterns to the project to some extent, so having an autonomous testing process involved can help you cover areas that even well-trained team members may miss in a manual test creation process.
Faster time to market
Yet another major benefit to autonomous testing is faster time to market for your project. By reducing the overhead of creating and maintaining tests across your project, and making it easier to scale as we’ve already mentioned, your project can release features and updates at a faster pace.
As we’ve alluded to already, autonomous testing can speed up or eliminate manual processes in creating tests, maintaining tests, mistakes during test creation, overlooked test cases, and inadequate test coverage. Cutting all of this out of the process or reducing it heavily means that your project will deliver to the market faster, and these benefits scale as your project grows.
More time spent adding value
Finally, the ultimate goal of your software project is probably to solve some problem or set of problems for the users of your software. This means that delivering value that your users need should be one of the top priorities for your team.
By spending less effort and resources on the manual aspects of testing, your team can use autonomous testing practices to free up resources and team members to improve your software and deliver more value-adding solutions to your users.
