How Software Testing can maximize ROI?

Test automation is often seen as a way to reduce the costs of testing, increase test coverage and effectiveness, and shorten testing cycles. In fact many software organizations consider automation as a vital step in establishing a mature QA program and it certainly has a lot of value if it can be effectively leveraged. However, it can never eliminate the manual testing, which is crucial for thorough testing of software applications, completely. 

Automated testing involves higher upfront costs and should be looked at as a long-term investment where the pay-offs come anywhere between 2-4 years down the road. One has to keep in mind that there are various intangible benefits associated with automation. Performing a return on investment (ROI) for your planned automation can however help you understand right at the beginning the actual returns that you will get from your investments and you can weigh those against the benefits you will gain from automation.

Automated Software Testing is a key technique that addresses some of the challenges software testers face today. Our experience has shown that if implemented correctly, Automated Software Testing

• Can reduce the time and cost of software testing.
• Can improve software quality.
• Can enhance manual testing efforts via increased testing coverage and replaces the manually mundane and labor intensive tasks.
• Can achieve what manual testing can hardly accomplish, such as memory leak detection under specific conditions; concurrency testing and performance testing, and more.
• Cost, schedule, and quality are parameters that are critical to the success of any software development and product. We will discuss how Automated Software Testing can contribute to each.

Test Automation ROI Calculator with which we can determine a high level approximation of effort and cost.  The test automation calculator comes up with an approximation of effort and savings if you choose to move towards test automation based on the following factors:

Product Details, Technology, Size, Release Details, Test Execution Parameters, Cost Details, Test Automation Tool, Test Automation Parameters, Cost Details.

ROI gains are made both with the initial test automation implementation and throughout the lifetime of an application system that is supported with the automation.

The ROI gains of this approach include:

• Improved test coverage and efficiency.
• Reducing implementation time.
• Making test automation usable for business users who can test their process areas.
• Reducing the upgrade cycle workload and deployment time.

Overall, you achieve much greater efficiency in your testing using Automation Testing, which results in shorter testing cycles. This means:

• The same testing can be achieved at a lower cost.
• More thorough testing can be achieved at the same cost.
• Increase speed to market.
• Generally, you can achieve a full payback on an investment in TAF Pro in 1-2 test cycles.

The Best Practices which ensure high ROI.

• Define the test strategy early.
• Identify and evaluate tools to suit business/product/team requirements.
• Keep your test artifacts always upto-date.
• Prioritize test areas based on requirement business criticality and projected test coverage.
• Use innovative collaborative testing tools to encourage informal tool driven collaboration and improve flow of information.
• Continuously monitor the test activities.
• Act as per the strategy.
• Follow the test plan thoroughly.
• Keep the sync between strategy and plan.
• Define and implement a test metric program.
• Perform cost-benefit analysis for each activity.

Best Practices to avoid deviation.

• Lack of Collaboration.
• Lack of Suspicion.
• Lack of Ownership.
• Lack of Skilled Engineers.
• Lack of Retrospection.
• Lack of sufficient testing.