yeKAdopting an automated testing process helps organizations with mostly bug-free releases and faster delivery metrics. Herein, it becomes essential to gauge if the ROI yields a value that justifies the change.

An equation frequently used for calculating Automation Testing ROIs is ROI = (gains-investment)/investment.

In this article, we will focus on these benefits of automation testing and how to improve the ROI of your test.

Let's get started.

Why Your Business Needs to Measure Automation Testing ROI

New technologies are coming to the fore by the year, and the prevailing market competition keeps the demand for faster release cycles high. The bar for inducing flexibility and speed in SLC (software development lifecycle) is higher with trends such as automation, DevOps, and continuous testing.

Why does your business need to measure automation testing ROI?

Understanding where you stand with system automation can help implement several things to drive automation and improved delivery. Here are some key areas to help enhance business decisions and processes by gauging the ROI in automation testing:

• Keep a tab on your system health: The focal benefit is that of being able to keep a check on your system health and device strategies to overcome any problems detected.

• Visualize and monitor the quality of work: Implementing automation correctly can help improve work quality and you can assess the same while measuring your ROI.

• Robust and lightweight change approval: The change approval process can be made more streamlined and you can measure the same to ensure that your employees/board members have the same feedback.

• Improve processes and workflow: Measuring ROI on automated systems helps understand if you were actually able to trigger an improvement in systems and work processes. Any challenges and constraints in the system can also be made visible by measuring this aspect.

• Effectively automate different aspects of business: In general, measuring automation testing ROI helps understand if different aspects of business were effectively automated to empower teams, encourage experimentation, and allow the working and communication process to be smooth.

Optimizing the testing and development processes is fast becoming a must for businesses to thrive and succeed. Herein, cost, quality, and speed are all important. Automation is a relatively new market trend that yields premium outcomes for businesses. So, measuring automation testing ROI specifies if automation is worth the effort.

Key Metrics to Measure Test Automation ROI

This list is by no means exhaustive, but nevertheless, the highlight here is over the differentiators that distinguish one business from the other and one team from another.

1. Business requirements that call for an implementation
2. Test cases associated with each requirement
3. Percentage of tests that can be automated
4. The complexity of test cases
5. Test cases from prior requirements needed for regression testing
6. The total number of configurations that call for testing

Later in the article, we will see the pitfalls that are going to appear while calculating the ROIs that automation testing will bring to any organization.

Calculating Automation Testing ROI

Calculating Automation Testing ROIs is going to cover several developmental stages and several tests. This includes running regression tests, the already prevalent tests over developed software versions. Similarly, one also uses automated tests for running through the software.

1. Automation of new tests

When planning to build an automation business case, one first considers how one is going to develop new business cases. Developing, executing, and maintaining the tests is going to take time. But, how much time will it take? What all tests are you going to automate? Which are the ones that will stay manual?

All these things are considered. After considering these matters, we will bring our focus on the total costs involved. These are calculated using a simple formula.

One will multiply the number of team members with the hourly cost for each team member.

Here, consideration has to be laid over team members working over both manual and automated tests. Don't leave out the team members who run manual tests.

Similarly, some tests are always going to stay manual. There's no point in automating them.

2. Automating the tests that you already have

We are building an automated business case. We will take a look at how we are going to calculate the cost for the automation of your prior test cases. The implication over here is your regression tests.

Regression testing is simply a process in which you run your older tests. This ensures that older bugs haven't resurfaced with the introduction of new changes in the software.

When you do regression testing, your organization will find success in the absence of bugs. Whatever product features that you have validated earlier will operate properly.

So, the test suites will be bigger as time passes. Their execution will also take longer. To meet these problems, you should automate regression testing. You can then go ahead with the new release more confidently.

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3. Coverage across environments

Automated testing has been put in place so that software quality improves. The costs will now reduce, and testing will quickly take place. Automation testing yields higher ROIs as compared to regression and manual testing.

In the IT industry, there is a new explosion of devices. Operating systems and browsers are also many. Different environments are now visible. By combining these environments, we can run our tests.

Your products should be accessible via different platforms. It is very unlikely that your users will use a single platform to access your product.

So, costs for environmental coverage are going to be involved. When calculating the same, one has to lay a consideration over whether tests will run in parallel? In many cases, a device lab is required such that test coverage stays comprehensive.

A bug should always be caught in the early stages of development to simplify the processes.

4. Lower defect leakage

Defect leakage implies the issues or bugs that end up in production because they were not discovered early in the software development lifecycle. This situation can arise due to distinct difficulties, including poor functional testing coverage or a poor environment.

Cost is the key metric that one will want to consider here. Lower process turnaround times imply lower costs. This way, defect leakage post-deployment will be lower.

The premium ways of avoiding defect leakage include starting testing earlier. Bugs will then be discovered earlier. Shifting left is a trend that many organizations nowadays follow. This is right opposite of the waterfall model, and shifting left closes the gaps.

Right from the time the creation of software begins, testers start testing it in its developmental phase. A significant bit of time, effort, and money can be saved by catching bugs early.

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Mistakes to Avoid While Measuring Automated Testing ROI

The measurement of automated testing ROIs is a must for an organization to see if the gradual shift towards automation has been productive or counter-productive. But this comes with a set of complexities, and the process bears a whole lot of significance here.

Let us take a look at a few of the points that a business should always keep in mind.

1. Making automated testing the only focus area

A few businesses err in creating, developing, and maintaining only automated tests. But, manual testing is always going to be important. Even as a business advances towards automated testing, manually executed test cases will always be involved. So, creating, running, and maintaining manual tests are also important.

2. Being unsure of the percentage of tests that need to stay manual

When a test features repetitive or redundant steps, it is ideal for automation. This, in turn, boosts the quality of testing while reducing the testing time and manual effort involved. But for a few of the tests, manual observation is a must, such as figuring out a website's aesthetics, user-friendliness, and navigability.

While these tests are not easy to automate, they do not yield high ROIs upon automation.

3. Syncing the automation tool stack with organizational capabilities is essential

In-depth knowledge about products and automation is quintessential for implementing an automation strategy. A business has to be sure about the automation tools they'd be using and the application they'd be testing.

4. Test maintenance is always an ongoing process

Upon creating and implementing your automation strategy, continuous maintenance and updating of your tests are also equally important. As time passes, you'd create new features and keep up with making product improvements.

Your regression and test case suites will correspondingly grow. To ensure that they retain their usability across months and years, continuous maintenance becomes a must.

Need help in automation testing? Contact our experts and learn how we can help you in the automation process.

Automation Testing vs Manual Testing: Is Test Automation Worth the Effort?

Automation testing is more efficient and quicker compared to manual testing, which is tedious and slow. A tool performs automation testing, unlike the case of manual testing where human effort is involved.

So, automation testing covers many more permutations. Testing in less time boosts productivity. Testing processes with automation reduce project turnaround times and time-to-market for the product.

It yields a competitive edge for the organizations. Nevertheless, specialized tools, like Selenium, which is an automation testing framework and human expertise, are required to create reusable test scripts. This yields higher efficiency over time. Sofyrus is your premium choice for test automation at the best industry prices.

How to Improve the ROI of Test Automation

To ensure that your efforts towards automation testing persistently yield accurate and reliable results, giving time and churning out a well-planned strategy is a must.

Sofyrus is a premium choice for boosting automation testing ROIs with all-around expertise. Your top considerations must include:

• 1. Defining the Scope of Automation Identifying the right test scenarios is important. These scenarios are repetitive and call for human intervention.

• 2. The Right Focus on Test Design Comprehensive code coverage will be efficiently achieved with fewer tests and shorter timelines with robust test design.

• 3. Using the right sort of Test Data While being optimally sized, data needs to be comprehensive and should include all components required for application testing.

• 4. Test maintainability Product evolution also needs to be accounted for when automation tests are designed.

• 5. Test automation execution A functional team has to test the automation scripts on an ongoing basis.

• 6. Cloud-based test automation Cloud infrastructure plays an important role in successful automation testing and boosting its ROIs.

Relevant Read: Cloud migration risks and how to avoid them

• 7. Use the right test automation framework Parameterization of test scripts and test data ensures long-term usability and efficiency.

Contact Sofyrus Technologies and learn how we can help you increase the automation testing ROI for your business.

Final Words

In the fast-paced world, an organization needs to be efficient. Test automation will induce efficiency in business processes. With the mitigation of human errors, QA (Quality Assurance) reaches an all-new high. Efforts invested in over-testing are reduced, and the time to market for products is lower. The time to embrace automation testing is now, and will bring success to your organization. We perform agile software development to make your products and services an all-around winner. Contact us today to know more about prompt app development and automation testing!