In an economic environment with record inflation and rising interest rates, business leaders are understandably worried about their company’s financial future. With the looming threat of a recession, automation can be an important tool to help your organization recover faster from economic downturns than your competitors.
In this blog, we’ll explain the following:
- What test automation is
- How test automation can give you a leg up over competitors during a recession
- How to get started with test automation in three easy steps
| See test automation in action: Schedule a demo!
What is test automation?
Test automation is the process of using technology to handle tedious and error-prone testing tasks, such as maintaining test data, executing tests, and analyzing test results. Automation helps IT teams focus on more important tasks and enables members to easily handle frequent application changes due to patching, updates, and employee demands.
Test automation is a perfect use case for regression testing. It significantly increases the speed of test execution along with the accuracy of test results, and it largely eliminates the tedious, manual work traditionally associated with regression testing.
- Increases productivity: Automated tests don’t require human interaction. Because these tests can run repeatedly on their own, software developers, QAs, and business users can spend less time on testing and more time on critical tasks. Additionally, these tests can run 24/7 since computers don’t require sleep, unlike manual testers.
- Mitigates risk: According to Gartner, the average cost per minute of application downtime for enterprise apps like Oracle Cloud, Oracle EBS, SAP, and Salesforce is $5,600/minute. Automated testing helps ensure minimal application downtime, as it allows you to test all your critical processes in a time-efficient manner.
- Reduces costs: Contrary to what many think, test automation is more cost-effective than manual testing in the long term. Manual testing processes do not streamline repetitive tests. As time goes on, the cost of testing your applications simply rises with the amount of labor needed to continue maintaining those tests. Alternatively, automated testing is cheaper in the long run because once you’ve created automated test scripts, you can reuse them endlessly at no additional cost.
- Accelerates innovation: A recent survey from Gitlab’s DevSecOps revealed that testing was the biggest bottleneck in the software development lifecycle. By automating testing, organizations can reduce this bottleneck and empower developers to release better software, faster. This enables enterprises to be more agile and respond quicker to market changes.
| Case Study: How Gap saved $900K with test automation
How to get started with test automation
1. Identify what to automate: The first step towards automation is to identify the processes that are relevant to your business. To identify a processes to automate, it should meet the following criteria:
- The process is defined, meaning a robot can readily be given instructions on how to carry out the duties.
- The procedure involves transferring data between several systems or applications, and up until now, manual labor has been used to do it.
- The process is repetitive, and is prone to human error. This makes the return on automation greater.
- The process would benefit from 24/7 work. Robots, unlike humans, can run constantly.
2. Assemble a team to own your automation: You must put together a team of individuals who can determine which processes and tests fulfill these requirements, have them properly onboarded in the automation tool, and have them responsible for setting up the automated processes and tests.
3. Select a tool and enjoy the benefits of automation: A no-code automation tool is vital when it comes to reaping the benefits of automation quickly and assuring low start-up costs with a minimal learning curve. No-code is optimal because any employee – not just technical ones – can contribute to test automation. In addition to no-code, your test automation platform should:
- Have expertise in the software you’re looking to automate (Oracle Cloud, EBS, Salesforce, etc).
- Utilize artificial intelligence to automatically heal broken test scripts. By largely reducing test maintenance efforts, your QA teams can focus on more high-value activities.
- Ensure optimal test coverage by immediately surfacing the tests your organization is running and recommend additional tests based on industry standards.
Conclusion
Test automation can help your enterprise prepare for a recession by reducing costs, increasing productivity, and mitigating risks. Opkey is the industry leader in test automation, and its no-code, ERP-aware platform enables you to reap the benefits of automation in just weeks. Speak to one of our experts today.
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