Is Software Test Automation needed?

The big challenge here is that every time you’re doing SCRUM you’re splitting up your work into iterations and one of the conditions of SCRUM is that by the end of each iteration your code needs to have production-like quality and it needs to be ready to be put in production.

This means that if you’re working on a project that requires 10 sprints for example, the second sprint needs to be built on top of the first one, the third on top of the second one and at any given time by the end of each sprint you should be ready to put your code into production.

How does this affect testing then?
Well, as a matter of fact, you need to progressively reduce the testing effort and need to start bringing more focus towards QA rather then QC. The reason behind it is that you cannot check because you will be repeating these tests for every subsequent sprint, even for every change in the code base. You need to drive development towards having more quality, meaning, you need to shorten the checking time to provide the team with quicker feedback loops.

How can you ensure quicker quality feedback?
You need to continuously and repetitively execute functional tests over and over that validate that you have a certain functionality developed and that it works, in other words Continuous Regression. To get to that extent you need to progressively consider the Testers that you have and convert them into QA engineers.

You need to have engineers gain knowledge on Automation methodologies and allow them to learn about ways to test a functionality without having to manually check that functionality. In other words, they need to be able to automate the tests they’re currently doing. Hence, they’ll have the chance to provide much more value to the software delivery life cycle (SDLC).

How Automation play significant role in Agile or DevOps?
In today’s world there is shift towards Agile and DevOps. It demands, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Regression and Continuous deployment. It demand faster, more comprehensive testing to improve quality and your time to market.

Manually testing each build is not acceptable. Automation allows testers to spend most of its time outside of SDLC execution time, allowing testing to run unattended 24×7! With the press of a button, regression testing can be completed without the risk of human error from executing repetitive, similar test cases, ensuring that your latest build breaks nothing. Improves coverage with barely any impact to your schedule, and then the test results can be automatically sent to test management tools for analysis as you see you meet exit criteria.