How do CIOs benefit from Test Automation?

Boardroom discussions more often than not lead to the question, “What are we doing to drive growth?”

While CEOs face the challenge of upping top line revenue growth, the CIO’s usually are the enabler of the technology that will lead to better revenues. With the entire world passing through digital disruption and all things undergoing automation and transformation, CIOs actually have become a one-man army of sorts, on whose shoulders lies the key to the success of an organization. While ensuring that there are no glitches in the product, CIOs also need to oversee continuous innovation so as to improve go-to-market times and reach more customers.

With so many organizations using multiple technologies paving way for faster go-to-market, and also focusing on continuous deployment, it has become imperative for the CIOs to change the way they strategize. Not only do the need to rein in the risks and failures if any, but they also need to keep their organization in the race.

As a Gartner report states, ‘Application leaders who are creating strategies for digital business must address a wide range of testing use cases across the enterprise.’

A key process that comes into mind when organizations think of speed, accuracy, continuity, robustness, and faster market presence is Automation. Based on Agile and DevOps practices, practicing automation also helps CIOs overcome their existing backlogs, verify and validate processes and puts the organization on a fast growth track. Automation also helps track and monitor your software that helps optimize it further for success. This adds the flavor of quality assurance and quality engineering – and you are on the way to launch the best products and success.

Additionally, in another report, Gartner goes on to say “Testing is one of the key processes in software development. As the requirement to support multiple browsers and devices increases, it is driving the demand to automate the functional testing of applications.” Test automation has become a business norm at most Fortune 1000 firms today. Implementing test automation across the board will not just improve production speed – but also help CIOs save huge amounts of precious time, cost savings, and accelerate improved productivity.

Let us look at a few ways test automation benefits CIOs – and therefore, their organizations.

1. Automated software testing saves time and money thereby improving bottom line: Repeating software tests help ensure quality. While manual repetition consumes a lot of time and resources, test automation helps run these continuously thereby saving a lot of time and efforts that directly results in cost savings and an improved bottom line. With the C-Suite focused on the bottom line, investments, expenditure, and eventually the ROI, test automation helps ensure that the organization is saving money and that the testing efforts are efficient.
2. Improves timeline and speed to market: The faster an organization can launch its product in the market, the better equipped it will be to meet consumer demands and needs. Test automation helps expedite the otherwise slow testing process and reduces the time-to-market and ensures quicker delivery. CIOs who embrace a shift left approach get the benefit of early and continuous testing throughout the development process in addition to faster time-to-market.
3. Reduces risk: If a software is launched with proper testing, your customers will be happy with the quality. However, if there are performance, functionality, security, or quality issues, you will end up losing customers in a snap. Conducting end-to-end automated tests helps reduce risks of a low quality product being launched – which otherwise has the full probability of resulting in dissatisfied users, revenue losses, and in this world of cyberattacks, serious data breaches.
4. Improves accuracy and efficiency: While manual testing may involve monotonous repetition of test steps that may lead to inadvertent errors, automating the tests leads to the execution of same steps being performed thousands of times precisely – along with recording detailed results. With that load off their shoulders, CIOs, and the team of experienced developers will be able to focus their energies and experience on other critical tasks as required, and improve the overall efficiency of the organization.
5. Improves morale of team: As your QA, development, and testing teams get freed from the mundane, repetitive tasks, they can spend more time on more important and challenging tasks. This leads to an improvement in their confidence and skills – which results in a better morale and spirit.
6. Helps testers & developers: Automating tests helps catch bugs early on, which helps both testers and developers save a lot of precious time later. This also saves heavy costs that would otherwise have to be incurred later on by the organization. This also leads to faster deployment of any updates that are brought upon due to and source code changes.
7. Automation helps create a virtual environment: Automated testing helps create a simulated environment where thousands of virtual users can interact and work together to create a quality product. Not to forget that such an environment also leads to a lot of savings with regards to hardware procurement, upkeep, and maintenance, and space required for the same.

Conclusion

With the high proliferation of automated testing techniques, it’s time for CIOs to start thinking seriously about test automation and quality assurance (QA) professionals to gain a competitive advantage. Test Automation usually focuses on service automation and QA testing. A few types of tests that may be automated are Black Box, functional, integration, regression, and unit testing.

Cigniti has a dedicated team of over 50 Architects and 700 test automation experts develop test automation IP/accelerators by leveraging industry trends, best practices, and reusable frameworks/libraries. By leveraging Cigniti’s enablers and the assets developed, organizations have reduced efforts in developing test automation framework by over 80%, saved more than 50% in test automation script development efforts, and realized over 70% reduction in overall regression testing efforts. Cigniti utilizes proprietary test techniques to identify automatable manual tests. Cigniti’s test automation methodology (and team) is well accustomed to Agile and DevOps environments ensuring consistent ROI during the entire agile lifecycle.

Contact us to know more.