Automation has been beneficial to the engineering and technology industries. It helps people produce desired outcomes with less time and effort to complete a job or project. The IT industry has been using automation for quite some time now, and it is only getting better as we move forward. In this article, we shall see why there was a significant swift change in the IT industry in terms of testing from manual to web automation.
Introduction to Web automation: Web application development has emerged as one of the most pressing needs for businesses. The growth of Web 2.0 applications is driving the need for online services and websites which are more sophisticated, dynamic, and interactive. Web automation testing is a well-known term in the industry now as it enables companies to develop high-quality software products with lesser time, cost and risk involved.
The main objective of web automation testing is to verify functional and non-functional requirements of a website or application through scripting techniques. Automation tools provide an independent source to validate that the application under test meets its requirement specifications.
Why did the IT sector choose to shift to Web automation?
As businesses expand, the industries also try to implement processes that get their work done quickly. Companies may try and test technologies that might give relevant results. But sometimes they don’t! For example, the IT department might embrace agile development to enable better and more frequent system releases. But as a result of this, the test team might be under growing strain. The increased burden of work might result in code errors, which in turn might negatively influence software quality. This will result in an increased chance of business-critical processes failing. There might always be a significant talent gap between developers and testers in the business. Developing tests might be time-consuming and error-prone. So what does the IT industry do now? They chose to shift to automated testing—moreover, web automation.
The Web automation Solution: Using web-based applications is now a common occurrence in our daily lives. The number of web applications being used by individuals, businesses and governments is increasing. Software development teams usually maintain these applications to ensure that they are working properly and efficiently. So having said that let us look at the benefits that web automation provides to any industry:
- Manual web application testing is one of the most complex tasks for QA, and it needs a lot of time and effort from testers to test web applications properly. Automation testing has been used as an efficient way to reduce the development and maintenance cost and increase software quality by performing regression tests.
- Automated testing can test websites for multiple browsers, platforms, and other characteristics simultaneously, saving a lot of time and giving consistent results with less or no errors.
- Businesses can now run their whole suite of regression tests automatically, and the product is tested in several environments for each run.
- In this approach, web automation acts as a quality assurance checkpoint for the software before it is released into production.
- Even when testing in many settings simultaneously, the execution time per test case has been reduced to a few minutes, compared to several minutes when testing in only one environment manually.
- Test case maintenance has also been considerably more efficient.
- Increased efficiency: Automating routine web-based tasks such as data entry, form filling, and report generation can save a significant amount of time and increase efficiency.
- Cost savings: By automating manual processes, businesses can reduce the need for manual labor, which can result in significant cost savings over time.
- Improved accuracy: Automated web processes can reduce the risk of human error, leading to more accurate results and fewer mistakes.
- Scalability: Automated web processes can handle a higher volume of work without additional resources, allowing businesses to scale up operations and handle more workloads.
- Competitive advantage: Automation helps businesses stay competitive by providing more efficient and accurate services to customers, allowing them to deliver faster and better results.