The State of Quality and Test Automation: How to Get Ahead of the Curve

More than half of all testers have difficulties automating their QA and testing processes.

Sixty-eight percent to be precise, according to Capgemini’s recent report on Quality. As a result, only 14-18% use automation actively, despite the technology and tools being available for more than 15 years now.

On top of that, 46% of enterprises find it difficult to find skilled and experienced test automation resources.

Facing these companies is the threat of falling behind, when others pick up on automation and, as a result, are able to deliver products and product updates significantly faster.

Moving forward, organizations will need to move toward higher levels of end-to-end testing automation. – Capgemini

What customers want: Quality at Speed

As more and more companies adopt agile approaches to testing and quality assurance, the notion of “Quality at Speed” has also picked up, and the pressure for these companies to deliver better and faster is high. Unfortunately, as Capgemini reports, many struggle to keep up, which has led to a focus on speed at the cost of quality.

The low adoption of automation is to blame. Without automating testing, it’s simply not possible to deliver Quality at Speed.

So what do you as a company do, when the pressure to automate is big, but you struggle to find the tools that will help you do so? What do you do when you find yourself spending more time on setting up automation than you would have on executing them manually?

Read more: 3 Challenges That Make QA Harder

A strategic dilemma

Companies are inevitably faced with a choice: Find a way to automate and keep up (or if you do it now, get ahead of the curve), or choose not to automate, and fail to deliver what the customers expect.

Automation, and especially smart test automation, is poised to bring about significant changes in the way QA and testing is done over the next two to three years and organizations need to have a strategy and roadmap in place if they want to reap the benefits. - Capgemini

Some companies have made or are planning to make their decision: As many as 79% of the respondents in Capgemini’s survey said that they were currently using or planning to use bots for the set-up of test environments.

So what’s keeping them?

Some of the issues behind the challenges companies have in testing are time, tools and methods: 52% say they don’t have enough time, 43% say they don’t have the right tools, and 34% say they don’t have the right testing process or method.

The question is then how do we give testers more time and better tools to work with?

The answer lies within the automation technologies: By taking advantage of technologies like digital assistants, bots and augmented reality, many plan to make automation a reality.

Effortless automation that creates tangible results

At the core of the obstacles testers face in adopting automation lies user-friendliness. Fortunately, as Capgemini notes, there are now an increasing number of tools and solutions which help testers overcome these obstacles.

Read more: How to Facilitate QA in Software with Test Automation

Visual, no-code automation tools are a good starting point, as their user-friendly nature lets tester get started with it quick and easy. Leapwork’s visual platform, for example, is intuitive to use for any person – whether they’re a tester, a manager or a QA Director. At the same time, it requires zero coding skills.

The companies who have placed their bets on tools like Leapwork are seeing the benefits; reduced costs, shorter time to market, better defect detection and improved risk coverage.

Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come, and test automation today, is just such an idea. - Capgemini

Capgemini’s report concludes that the time for test automation is now. Every trend extracted from the survey points towards it and contributes to the importance of it; “either because automation is a critical ingredient for these trends to succeed or because they have a multiplier effect on the benefits that automation can offer.”

To learn more about how Leapwork’s platform can help you automate your way to Quality at Speed, join our webinar on speed vs. risk in QA.