With COVID-19, life has changed considerably over the past couple of months. The pandemic has impacted all of us. We all needed to find new ways to communicate, new ways to work and more importantly, we all needed to learn how to adjust to a new work-life balance.
There has been a huge shift in our working landscape. Businesses have realised they need to rely on technology to get teams to seamlessly work from out of the office. In the world of remote working, collaboration tools are now essential. This has led many companies to reassess their needs and to change the way they work.
Covid-19 has not only created new challenges in software testing but also amplified existing ones. The solution, however, may be as simple as automation. We are now at a point where companies are realising the immediacy of trying to automate their testing processes, as they learn more about the benefits automation will bring.
Why is it important to start testing automation today?
Covid-19 has exposed inadequacies, even created gaps in the way we used to work, which in turn hinder test delivery. Staff redeployment, child care responsibilities, even illness has strained internal resources and remote working has made some operational processes cumbersome.
Businesses now need to leverage available technologies such as automation to facilitate efficient delivery. Investing in automation will lead to:
A decrease in cost: With resources stretched and an increase in management overheads due to remote working, companies might find it hard to hire proficient testers to go through lengthy manual tests.
Quick testing times: Automation would allow a test to be run in minutes. A report will then be automatically produced so that User Acceptance Testing (UAT) can sign the testing off once the output report has been reviewed.
Flexibility: Remote workers need a different toolset and automation will help define and apply practical solutions between different teams.
Resourcing issues, solved
Your development and testing teams are tied up with getting back to business as usual. They are busy creating and maintaining your systems. Sometimes, however, businesses get stuck in a development mindset. Additionally, restrictions on workforce capacity and available skills also impact test delivery. Testing tends to take the backseat and as more processes are added, it becomes harder to go through full system tests. This then leads to low system quality and low testing confidence due to manual regression. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The banking industry is a perfect example of how software testing automation can be put into practice. With the power and speed available only through automation, tests can be rolled out to the whole mortgage solution: from the brokers portal to the back office and the database, and everything in between: reporting, regulatory, product variations and services. As developers launch new updates, automation is geared up to go through the whole testing cycle, again and again, swiftly.
Choose specialists rather than generalists
Setting up a dedicated automation team is a big step due to the costs involved. Hiring a supplier like Cinq Amis will provide auxiliary support to your current team and inject the skills sets, resources and knowledge needed to create a fully automated system (not just Happy Path).
Cinq Amis deliver test automation as a service. We have years of experience testing systems, specifically in the banking industry. It doesn’t need to be complicated and that’s why we have distilled a package consisting of 5 simple steps. Your systems will be fully automated - end to end, complete with trained, internal capability - and all this is done at a fixed price.