Why spend time and money on automation?

The Cost of Fixing Defects

Software defects in live systems can bring businesses to a halt, and can be very costly even if repaired quickly. When a live application fails, consider what can happen:

• Users may be unable to process business transactions.
• The failing application(s) must be identified, corrected and re-tested.
• If the failure has caused data corruption then the extent of this must be analyzed.
• In the event of repeated failures the users will become disenchanted with the application and lose confidence.

If you replace the word ‘users’ with ‘customers’ in the above, the problem reaches a new level of magnitude. A system failure has the potential to affect every prospect, customer and supplier. An unreliable internet application equates to commercial suicide - and online customers are your least forgiving audience. Once customers lose confidence in the application - and that loss of confidence happens very quickly - they will simply seek an alternative source of supply.

Manual or automated testing?

Anybody who has been involved with manual testing knows its nature. It is demanding, it is repetitive, and it becomes increasingly laborious and time-consuming to go back and check every possible effect every time a small change is made.

Properly testing your applications is your best guarantee of not disappointing your customers, suffering downtime and losing revenue and opportunities.

But automation, implemented badly, will simply add to your workload. Bad automation incurs expensive training and retraining, lengthy set-up and maintenance times, poor integration with your existing processes and (usually) an eventual return to manual testing.

On the other hand, done properly, automation can vastly increase the coverage of your testing and the efficiency of your development resources. But it will only do so if your solution of choice is:

• Easy to learn
• Easy to maintain
• Easy to maintain
• Can offer a fast ROI and productivity benefits
• Can grow and develop with your system

Otherwise, it will quickly become just another piece of (expensive?) shelf-ware.

Discover what constitutes good test automation and consider the true business benefits of comprehensive and efficient automated testing.

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