How Automated Testing Closes the Development and Delivery Gap

Organizations are adopting digital transformation strategies to ensure their digital offerings are at pace with their in-person operations. Over recent years, it has become certain that digital transformation is not just a fad but is here to stay and significantly impacts employee and customer experience.

Digital transformation also highlights the gap between customers and developers by asking vital questions like how long customers must wait for a new product or update or how much time organizations need to build and deliver products.

When customers visit a website and purchase an item by placing it in a shopping cart, their journey ends there. Customers have expectations regarding the quality of the product and the time it takes to reach them, and these expectations don’t account for the organization’s troubles.

Organizations will have various systems that monitor availability, loyalty, promotions, sourcing, product pickup, packaging, and delivery. With so many things to consider, which ones should they prioritize? This bind can lead to delays that lead to poor user experience.

Test automation helps close the gap between development and delivery. However, before we understand how it does this, let’s first understand automation testing.

What is automation testing?

Automation testing helps identify issues with the software and check if it meets specific requirements. It allows developers to verify if their software or equipment works the way they intend. It also tests for defects, bugs, or any other problems that can come up during development.

Developers can perform test automation at any time of the day. While you can run regression and functional tests manually, automation brings further benefits like using automated scripts to analyze software and automatically report issues; you can compare these issues with earlier tests since automating keeps track of all tests. Developers write automation test scripts in JavaScript, Ruby, and C#.

QA testers write automation test scripts and work with product developers and test engineers to execute these test scripts and test products and software. They control the test automation initiatives, forming teams and using various test automation platforms to identify and establish the best one.

Automation testing helps businesses streamline their testing processes and benefit from maximum ROI. Automated testing shortens a product’s development life cycle, reduces human error, and automates repetitive tasks.

So how does automation help reduce the gap between development and delivery? Here are three ways how it does this.

Automation Helps Relieve The Testing Bottleneck

Improving speed-to-market is a definite advantage for many organizations. Many platforms are offering low-code or no-code, cloud-based apps to improve speed-to-market. However, developers notice that performing test automation for these apps is a high-maintenance, high-code activity.

Planning an automation strategy early on can help prevent these bottlenecks. The idea is to ensure your continuous development efforts also include continuous testing. By giving more of their employees access to test automation, organizations can streamline their current development cycles by removing the need for technical constraints and the need to have specialized knowledge.

Ensuring Higher-Quality Output

In-sprint testing helps align testing and development efforts and helps organizations develop and produce higher-quality products. When development teams implement new features, the aim is to test each feature early and automate it immediately. Doing this will help teams within the organization catch errors early and easily instead of at the end of development.

Enabling automation early in the development process empowers the organization’s regression testing efforts; while teams ensure that functional testing keeps the app running seamlessly. The more you use automation, the more mainstream it becomes, paving the way for a comprehensive range of collaborators involved in the organization’s testing efforts.

Better User Experience

Over the years, developers running tests focused on improving app functionality and other technical aspects of the app. User experience, on the other hand, saw stylistic and usability changes – which are undoubtedly important. When a user sees the app, the first thing he will notice is its logo. Right from the first interaction, what users see about the app and how smooth its user interface is, plays a significant role. However, users focus on app functionality once this phase is complete. Hence, creating a better user experience is a complete package and must include testing the app’s technical and graphical features.

Organizations can start this right from the building and designing phase. They can improve their business processes by ensuring each build and design aspect focuses on the user’s journey; this helps everyone in the organization understand how users work and significantly improves all future builds.

Conclusion

Customers today expect online and in-person experiences, in whatever avenue, to be similar, seamless, and without issues. These expectations make it challenging for companies to keep up with the pace. They have to be capable of pushing updates to their apps quickly and frequently.

Automation testing can help increase the testing pace and also simplify it. It can help testers focus on improving functionality while it provides valuable feedback on errors.