A Primer on Test Automation Challenges and ROI
Test automation has become the favorite word in the software testing industry. With the right testing framework, any test case can be automated to eliminate time-consuming, repetitive tasks, increase coverage and efficiency on huge data sets, and run faster tests in the CI/CD (continuous integration/ continuous delivery) workflow. It fills in the gaps arising due to the incorporation of digitization and the limited skills of the company’s workforce. Thereby, making it one of the inevitable parameters in application development.
The role of test automation cannot be neglected, however, the decision about what to automate, when to automate, and how to automate is one of the major challenges which can either have a positive impact or unfavourable effect. These criteria set as the primer for software testing and define efficient business models for better ROI. Conversely, by determining the ROI, it can also be easily decided if automation is worth performing on a particular task.
Software testing — A significant challenge for BFSI industry
The BFSI sector has witnessed a drastic technological evolution in the last few years to stay relevant in the global market. This has led to a shift from conventional banking systems to modern digital ones, which undergo rapid updates to keep up with the trend. With the increasing frequency of system changes, QA forms a significant challenge for BFSI CIO’s globally. Engineers are building efficient test automation platforms to ease the quality assurance process in banking sector and increase the accuracy, consistency, and performance by nearly 100%.
The entire test automation challenges can be summarized in two scenarios, namely high volatility of the complex solution, and the quality of the testing operations. When these challenges are handled well, you can be sure of a flawlessly working system that offers maximum efficiency in lesser time.
Coping up with high volatility scenarios in application development
The complex solutions are undergoing significant changes on a regular basis. Though, these changes are associated with high volatility, when tackled them in an efficient way, they can help the organization achieve greater success with improved ROI. The high volatility scenarios include a series of events that comprise of:
Innovation: Today’s business models are dependent on innovations. It is essential for a business’ success as they keep you at par with the current/future trends, influence strategic planning, improve customer experience, and most importantly increase the ROI metrics. Innovations are dynamic process creating high volatility scenarios of changing business models, systems, workflows, application frameworks, and a lot more.
Though innovations are essential for an organization’s growth, they are often considered to be a significant challenge as they are expensive, time-consuming, and the uncertainty of the success rate. A powerful test automation solution helps an organization to speed up the innovation process. Any new idea which needs to be executed can be tested quicker, faster, with no human intervention, and maximum efficiency. By automating the testing of innovative applications, organizations can easily and quickly determine the success rate and make further decisions.
Regulatory changes: One of the major challenges faced by financial systems are to meet a whole new set of constantly changing regulations, either from the organization or the regulatory bodies. It is important to comply with the regulation, otherwise, you may open yourself up to potential lawsuits and financial liabilities. The scenario of regulatory changes is of high volatility, which can be kept under check with a powerful test automation solution by detecting any compliance or regulatory risks.
Competition: Competition and market volatility are proportionally linked to each other. The only way to curb competition and establish your brand is to improve the quality of the product. Test automation helps to achieve nearly 100% accuracy, consistency, and efficiency.
Integrated systems: Business environment are constantly changing, and new technologies are being introduced to adapt to this rapidly changing scenario. Time and time again, organizations integrate various IT systems to improve the functionality of the system by streamlining the product life cycle. The integrated systems or changes can often lead to discrepancies; hence, such volatile integration scenarios can be tackled with a strong QA approach.
Agile/ DevOps Practices: The business world today is highly dynamic and competitive; hence, agile/DevOps practices are essential to cope up with the speed and flexibility and offer the right solution. To implement the agile practices, it is a pre-requisite to have a powerful testing solution. Codeless test automation is popular for testing in agile systems, as they conduct rapid regression and support CI/CD for better business outcomes.
Quality: Test automation solutions
Quality of any product or service is the USP of a company; hence, compromising on the quality is a big NO. The same is true for building software applications, which is currently running on test automation trend. In the process of designing and building an application, it is essential to test it before deployment. Adequate and optimized testing ensures smooth operations despite high volatility. Test automation is considered by all major industries to perform the QA; they are optimized for different test cases and considered to be a vital part of the process.
In complex systems, a strong and resilient testing process is required to ensure maximum accuracy, agility, and consistency. Test automation provides unique opportunities to test the entire case at different levels of complexity, which cannot be easily performed by manual efforts. By incorporating automated solutions, companies are witnessing a drastic transformation in the core operations and increased profit margins.
Benefits of test automation:
- Control and transparency
- Reduced cycle time
- Reduced test costs
- Better test coverage
- Better detection of defects
- Better reuse of test cases
Automation allows teams to focus on “net-new”
Software development process are highly dynamic and complex, which are often introduced to a new functionality, time and time again. The “net-new” functionality, most of the times, forms a small part of the overall software performance and it becomes important to conduct the testing to cover “regression.” Test -Automation helps increase the volume of tests that can be executed in a fixed period while reducing cost-to-test.
Though regressions are majorly conducted to check the performance of the newly introduced functionality, they also determine the “net-new” ROI. The incremental profit margin is directly associated with the introduction of the new functionality.
Test Automation — Understanding Costs & Benefits
With an inexhaustible list of benefits test automation offers, companies are leaning towards them to improve the quality of the application. There is no doubt about the benefits test automation has to offer, but the cost of installation and maintenance forms the key factors in getting the test automated.
The cost of the test automation can be categorized as:
- Acquisition cost
- Maintenance cost
Acquisition cost: There are some free test automation tools available in the market. The free versions mostly perform basic functions and are not recommended for a thorough end-to-end or regression testing.
To buy an efficient test automation tool, you will require to make some investment. A licensed and open-source automation tool may start with as low as $4000, depending on the brand and functionality it offers. The total acquisition cost is often inclusive of the tool cost and construction cost. Before investing in the tool, it is recommended to do a thorough research and understand the right tool that will complement your requirements perfectly.
Maintenance cost: Maintenance cost of automated tests drive expenses up. Maintenance may involve a range of factors:
- Process
- User interface
- Data
- Environment
However, maintenance of automated tests may cost you a bit, statistics reveal the fact that maintenance can be a lot more cheaper affair than creating new test scripts. Furthermore, frequent maintenance will keep the system efficient and seamless. Maintenance is a good option while considering the cost model of the project, as manual testing or implementing new automation tool can be expensive and time-consuming.
The investment in the right automation tool is worth it, as it offers potential benefits like:
Coverage: Test automation offers high test coverage with nearly 100% results, which otherwise cannot be achieved by manual testing.
Consistency: Test automation tools offer maximum consistency. The same test case run multiple times will yield the same result without even a minor deviation.
Speed: Automation is multiple times greater than the manual testing speed. As the tool has the ability to learn and relearn, it’ll quickly perform the task even in the event of major system changes.
Effort: The manual effort in executing a test automation tool is almost negligible. The tool mostly ‘learns’ and ‘relearns’ the process by itself. However, a good initial manual scripting would be required.
The challenges of test automation in financial institutions
The increasing digital evolution has forced the banks and financial institutions to embrace technology and improve customer experience. The BFSI industry which deals with highly sensitive financial data, initially adapted the new technological trends to combat issues of anti-money laundering detection and portfolio management. This slowly flourished to other financial processes like transactions, loan origination, loan management, payment wallets, funding advisory, and so on. The complete shift of banking and financial processes from traditional systems to digital systems led to implementation of software development cycle backed by strong test automation.
In the journey of completely adapting to digitalization, banks/financial companies are facing major tech challenges. The implementation of test automation solution is a major challenge where banks/companies struggle to integrate automation into the existing systems. Here, the existing system may not be compatible with the test automation tool. Further, it should be confirmed that the privacy and security measures are correctly implemented. Most importantly the automation tool should accurately and consistently perform the task across all kinds of workflow systems. Here is a list of challenges faced during implementing automation.
Key challenges in implementing automation
Higher emphasize on end-to-end lifecycle automation for better ROI: End-to-end testing is performed to make sure that the system works flawlessly from the end-user perspective. This is an important business objective as it is linked directly to the ROI. Though businesses are emphasizing on end-to-end automation, there are some challenges associated with it:
· End-to-end automation are best executed in a sequential order; however, it is difficult to manage in distributed workflows
· End-to-end testing is associated with access issues. Though, testing of applications are easy in a Dev environment yielding 100% accuracy, it becomes difficult to test the application offline or in production environment.
Heterogeneous system landscape and diverse platforms/applications to test: All software applications are built on heterogenous landscapes; differentiating as core and edge network, industrial type applications, product lifecycle stages, and application interface type. The challenges lie in selecting the right test automation tool. Further, it also depends on the factor if the same tool can or cannot be used for processing and reporting, as processing forms a single-step process while the report is a multi-step process.
Application stability and functionality changes too frequently: The continuous change in functionality for better user experience is directly connected to the UI interface, which should also be tested simultaneous to eliminate any error that pops up during the functionality change. In such scenarios, the cost associated with script maintenance is high. To avoid the situation, it is recommended to keep basic UI, which will not be affected with frequent functionality changes.
Need for technology orientation and multi-skilling and frequent up-skilling: The software testing trends have moved from manual to test automation and hyper automation. This changing trend demands the tester to upskill and reskill to adapt to their changing roles. To hire the right skillset or investing in honing the skills of the testers is a major challenge faced by many companies.
Diverse, complex tooling landscapes and no right automation tools: One of the major challenges in implementing automation is choosing the right tool. The system landscapes are diverse and complex, the same test automation cannot prove efficient across all applications as they have a different built and working structure.
Stability of test script and high maintenance: Test scripts maintenance can be another challenge while automating the workflow system. Test script maintenance challenges can be due to:
- Unstable test environment arising due to several factors like parallel testing, infrastructural issues, repeated test cases, and so on.
- Data collision due to repeated test sets
- Unknown network issues
- Poorly written scripts
Lack of skilled and experienced test automation resources: Software system has witnessed evolution, growing from manual to automated solutions. With the dynamic changing testing environment, the older skills no longer align with the modern trends. Hence, companies are facing issues with lack of skilled resources to efficiently handle the testing activities.
Complex data requirements and high touch, integrated environment: Another challenge faced by companies to test complex data in an integrated environment is to choose the right tool. Also, the integration may not align perfectly with existing system, which may lead to showing up inconsistent result by the automation tool.
Current tools in the market are developer centric and not user-centric: The test tools available today are programming heavy, application agnostic, and low resilience to change. Such tools are designed for developers and not user-friendly.
Traditional Test Automation Process
Traditionally, test automation is a process of automating the testing procedures using software tools. This practice helps with efficient and timely results. Test automation is an elaborate process that consists of:
- Test design
- Application discovery
- Test data
- Test execution
- Report and analysis
Test Design: Test design is the strategy phase which determines how the testing should be carried out. It involves the identification of test cases under predefined test conditions. This is a manual process, and the strategy is defined by a skilled tester.
Application Discovery: Application discovery is used to identify different servers and network devices, and application interface like API or GUI, where the application has to be tested.
Test Data: This stage specifies data that can be used to get accurate results. Usually, a set of confirmatory data is run to check for expected results. Test data involves manual efforts and existing records.
Test Execution: This stage performs code execution, where the actual and expected results are compared. An appropriate test suite is required to perform the execution. Mostly, executions are performed in CI/CD pipelines to achieve faster results.
Reporting and Analysis: This is the final stage that determines the success and failure of the test, execution status, and reporting analysis. It is carried out using multiple BI (Business Intelligence) frameworks.
In a nutshell, test automation is changing the software testing for better. The integration of AI and ML are further transforming the automation process to achieve better and faster results.
