Your testing team is scrupulous, but regardless, you always seem to find a multitude of defects in production. While improving your test coverage, speed and accuracy is an obvious solution, it has always seemed prohibitively expensive. With test automation, however, your solution isn’t just affordable—it can cut your budget in half!
| Test automation offers your organization the holy trinity of testing improvement: faster testing, increased coverage, and improved accuracy— |
Defects are inexorably persistent. No matter how hard your software team works—and I’m sure they work their butts off—the final code they deliver always seems to have its fair share of production-level defects. This seems true whether your team is doing Agile, Waterfall, or the “ever-popular Wagile.” Like a pest infestation, no matter how hard you try to eliminate them, they always seem to come back.
And when it comes to solving this vexing problem, the usual suspects—improving test coverage, speed, and accuracy—are all too often ignored due to their anticipated cost. In a way, this makes sense; trying to accomplish these tasks manually means more hours, more manpower, and more training—an ingredient list that makes for one prohibitively expensive cocktail (especially when you consider how tight IT budgets tend to be). But, as defects, rework, and user frustration continue to mount, what’s a savvy, budget-conscious IT team to do?
How about doing exactly what you think you can’t afford? And how about cutting your testing budget in half while doing so? That’s the power of test automation.
Whether you utilize Selenium, Oracle Application Testing Suite (Oracle OATS), Hewlett-Packard Unified Functional Testing (HP UFT/QTP), or any other tool, test automation offers your organization the holy trinity of testing improvement: faster testing, increased coverage, and improved accuracy—and all at an efficiency that can cut your budget by as much as half! By creating reusable automated testing scripts, you’ll run more tests than a manual testing team, execute them faster (without the need for constant attention), be able to test innumerable data scenarios, and not have to deal with the inconsistency of human error. Pretty sweet deal, right?
Granted, there’s no getting around the up-front investment that automation requires. You’ve got to hire or train automation engineers (or use a really awesome third-party partner to handle it for you), develop an automation strategy, and select or develop a framework, just to get started; but once you are settled, it’s smooth sailing from there. The real question you need to ask yourself is, “Is it worth it?”
And while I can’t give you that answer, I do know where you can get it. Give us a call and we can help you determine if it’s right for you.
Cheers,
Mike Hodge
Lighthouse Technologies, Inc
Software Testing | Quality Assurance Consulting | Oracle EBS Consulting
