Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and performance bottlenecks so that if any problems are found, they are fixed
immediately. Similarly, whenever any patch has to be applied in any production
environment, the patch is tested in a test environment using sanity tests. If san-
ity tests pass in the test environment, then the patch is applied on the production
environment. These sanity and performance test cases are also good candidates for
automation.
Coupled with offshoring, automated testing provides a compelling business
impact. It can reduce the overall cost of testing by more than 70% over a mid-
range to long period of time. The offshoring partners create a central test organiza-
tion and utilize shared resources, methodology, and knowledge repository across
all of their customer engagements to provide consistent, superior, fast, and very
cost-effective ways to provide better results for you. For this exercise they create
centers of excellence at their development centers so that they have a pool of test
architects, automation engineers, functional consultants, and test leads. Whenever
any project comes, a team is formed and depending on workload across all projects,
these resources are allocated to the project depending on availability. This approach
provides not only a means of better utilization of resources (skilled resources are
never sitting idle on the bench for want of project work) but also consistency and
superior testing effort and results.
Some of the often-cited benefits of test automation include the following:
◾
tests) repeatedly and become reluctant to do it. Automation provides a good
escape from such scenarios.
Return on investment—If the same test case has to be executed more than
People lose interest in manually executing the same test cases (regression
◾
five times (which is often the case for most regression tests), then the cost of
licensing the tool, deploying automation engineers, and using time to create
the test script is justified. The ROI will depend on the cost of the automation
tool license, the effort required to write test scripts, and the salary of automa-
tion engineers.
Fast execution—If a test suite takes 3 hours to execute manually, using auto-
◾
mation script and running it may take just 15 minutes. So you may end up
saving a large amount of time in winding up your testing. This will also
ensure that your new release will go to market in record time and costly
delays in marketing your product can be avoided.
Avoid manual errors—Executing test cases manually can lead to human
◾
error. Running these test cases using an automation tool will avoid these
manual errors.
Avoid need of additional resources—With the number of regression tests
◾
growing exponentially over software releases, additional resources are required
to run these tests. With the introduction of automation, additional resources
may not be required.
