Understanding ROI in Test Automation
In the era of data-driven decision-making, leadership rarely invests a single dollar from the business budget without having a clear grasp of the projected returns. Agile teams in particular find themselves in the limelight, having to present their work and explain why test automation should be used together with other crucial tools.
The benefits of test automation extend beyond testers. Test automation also benefits the developers within each feature’s team as they too take an active part in test automation. It involves using automated testing tools and scripts to execute tests, compare actual results to expected outcomes, and report test results. This approach offers a plethora of benefits such as increased test coverage, faster test execution, and early defect identification.
This article explores the significance of test automation along with the formula to calculate Return on Investment (ROI). Additionally, it lists a comparative table of benefits obtained from test automation.
The Formula: Measuring ROI
ROI is a critical metric that evaluates the effectiveness of an investment. When referring to test automation, ROI weighs the costs involved in implementing and maintaining automated tests against the benefits gained from improved testing efficiency and quality.
You can use the following formula to calculate ROI.
While there are various factors that contribute to ROI, you’ll need to understand the cost and time benefits associated with test automation to use the formula. Also, it’s just a metric that gives you the approximate return value you can get by embedding an automation strategy into your QA.
Calculating Time Benefits : A significant aspect of ROI is how test automation contributes to faster time-to-market. Calculate the time saved through automation in test execution, test case creation, and regression testing. Not only does automation improve testing efficiency, but it also frees up valuable resources for more strategic and creative tasks.
| Benefit | Impact of not using Automation | How does Automation save time? |
| Enhanced Productivity | Your developers and testers can have effort burnout due to the mundane and repetitive tasks | Automation tool has the ability to work 24*7, 365 days a year, and at war speed. Tools like AI Defect Predictor tool can help them reduce their defect triage time. |
| Faster defect identification | Traditional testing is left at the end where you need to deal with a whole load of bugs and critical issues post-development. | Shift Left testing provides an effective means to perform testing in parallel to development processes. Save enormous amounts of time in diagnosing and Defect Triaging |
| Enhanced test coverage | The application can be exposed to invalid inputs, unusual conditions, or unexpected events that are not covered while designing the test cases. | A combination of test cases-based testing, negative and edge case testing, and Exploratory Testing helps you increase the testing coverage, ensuring more comprehensive testing |
| Test Execution Time | Traditional testing will take weeks to execute and provide defect details to the development and testing teams. | Execute automated tests by running a suite of tests |
| Test case creation time | Creating test cases manually is a repetitive, time-consuming process and may require frequent updates as the application changes. | Create and maintain test scripts quickly compared to producing manual test cases |
| Regression testing time | Test cases keep changing due to a defect fix or feature change. You need to validate these changes in every build. This creates immense pressure on your testing teams. | Test automation can perform regression tests frequently and is carried out in 3 environments – Staging, Integration, and Development, to ensure that the existing application is not broken. |
Calculating Cost Benefits : It’s important to account for all expenses related to automation. By assessing the potential cost savings, teams can make informed decisions about implementing the test automation. You can also consider both short-term and long-term savings, including reduced resoiurces costs and improved application quality.
| Benefit | Impact of not using Automation | How does Automation save cost? |
| Initial setup costs | The expenses for acquiring tools, licenses, hardware, and infrastructure. | Streamlining IT infrastructure management like setting up the servers, configuring them, deploying the applications, and managing the load helps in avoiding any issues in the scalability and availability of the application |
| Maintenance costs | Automation scripts and infrastructure need to be continually updated to keep your automation ecosystem up-to-date and efficient | Self-healing mechanism helps you to reduce Test maintenance by learning if there is a change made, and then automatically modifying the test automation script to fix the problem. |
| Cost of fixing escaped defects | Post-release defects can be expensive and time-consuming to fix. | Teams can Shift Left to detect issues early in the testing lifecycle. By catching issues in pre-production testing, organizations can significantly reduce or eliminate defects. Fewer or no post-release defects result in cost savings related to bug fixes and support. |
| Infrastructure Cost | Teams need to perform manual configuration of individual deployment environments and this causes environment drift in the release pipeline. | Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the management of infrastructure using code files. The teams can test the applications in production-like environments early in the development cycle, preventing configuration drift and errors that surface after the release. |
Keys Points to Consider
Before you start calculating, you should be aware that it is quite challenging to arrive at quantifiable metrics. You need to approach test automation ROI as an estimation rather than an exact number.
The Perks of Embracing Cloud Testing
Testing as a Service enables the teams to focus on higher-value priorities like defect resolution and quality analysis. It creates test cases and test scripts and keeps them up-to-date.
Unlike traditional testing, cloud-based testing resources can be dynamically scaled up or down as per the project’s requirements. In a time when software development workloads can be unpredictable and differ greatly between different projects, this adaptability is crucial. Overall, adopting cloud testing can result in better quality, faster time-to-market, cost savings, and higher efficiency for your applications.
Partner with Webomates to get maximum ROI by implementing these principles.
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