The faster a business startup enters the market, the higher the chances of it to succeed! But, in the rush of joining the market as soon as possible, startups must not trivialize the importance of testing as they have a very little space for mistakes in the beginning. Startups are about speed, but delivering a buggy app or website can kill the first impression and quickly turn off users, making testing an essential part of the development process. However, most startups run tight on time and money and the sole reliance on manual testers to do all the heavy lifting consumes a lot of time and quickly shrinks their budget. But thanks to automation testing which actually makes it possible for startups to deliver a high quality product fast while also keeping the testing cost low. Let’s see when QA automation is necessary for business startups.

Automation Testing is Perfect for a Startup When:

• There are multiple updates and releases. 
• Repetitive tests sap money and time.
• Testing is required at a large scale with the utmost efficiency.
• There is a heavy intensity of regression testing.
• Manual errors can lead to revenue loss as software functionality includes cost figures and mathematical calculations.
• Some manual tests take a lot of effort and time.
• Involves data-driven and keyword-driven testing 
• There is a greater increase in the execution tempo.
• Manual load testing, smoke testing, and performance testing are time-consuming and expensive
• Turn around time is lesser, even for high-risk software testing.

How Automation Testing benefits Startups

24/7 Test Execution

Automation helps startups expedite the testing cycle as tests can be performed 24/7 from anywhere, anytime in the world. For example, regression testing has to be done from time to time for software that has multiple releases, upgrades or updates. If 80 hours of manual effort is required for regression testing, it will take 10 days for a single tester to do so. On the other hand, automation will get the task done in just 80/24 days, which means 3.3 days. Therefore, automation will save a lot of time and manual effort that goes in testing. Also, if clients ask to perform testing at odd hours (Let’s say 3 am in the morning), manual testers will find it troublesome after a hectic day at work. The beauty of test automation is that it allows you to schedule your test case execution to run at any hour of the day, so working hours are never a problem with test automation.

Improved Efficiency and Accuracy in Repetitive Tasks

Regression testing has long been a pain point of testers as they have to repeat a set of similar test cases again and again to ensure that an update or change has not adversely affected the existing functionalities. This not just consumes a lot of time and money but also reduces the efficiency of testers. Also, as startups have time constraints, they may not be able to thoroughly perform regression testing every time the software gets updated. Manual testing is also subject to human errors and it’s difficult to establish if tests are performed the same way every time. All these issues make automation ideal for regression testing. Testers have to make a one-time effort in building automated test cases to execute test-suites repeatedly each time a change is made to the code. Therefore, automation keeps QA teams from spending a significant amount of time in doing tedious tasks and from having to fix human error-based issues. Less numbers of tests to be performed manually also increases the test coverage, which is another benefit of test automation.

Increased Test Coverage

It’s very challenging to get 100% test coverage with manual testing as it puts limits on how many tests you can verify. When you automate testing, you save a lot of time and effort that goes in manual testing, which in turn allows your QA team to spend more time on writing new tests and examining the system across its every facet. This increases the test coverage and ensures a high quality software product. Also, manual testers often avoid writing lengthy tests for  complex use cases. Automated testing provides a window to testers to write more in-depth tests and run them unattended.

Reusability of Test Suite

Yes, it takes more time to write automated tests than manual tests. However, once your automated test suite is defined, you can easily reuse tests as many times as you want. Writing the same tests manually leaves testers mentally exhausted, which is why the reusability feature of automation testing proves to be a big respite for the QA team. Take cross-browser testing for example. To do cross-browser testing manually, you’re required to write test scripts every time to test an application on different operating systems or devices. QA automation saves you from doing this arduous task as you don’t always need new scripts even if the OS version on the device gets changed. So, you can redo the same test again without forgetting any steps, which saves both time and efforts. 

Automation also makes it much easier to perform browser compatibility testing. Performing manual testing over several devices, browsers, OS combinations may cause congestion in the software release process. Automation in mobile app performance testing makes it possible to execute tests on hundreds of devices and operation systems at a very fast speed and simultaneously.

Test Reports to Analyze Numerous Test Cases

In the manual testing environment, testers have to communicate with each other to know how many test cases have been written, how many bugs have been discovered and how many of them have been fixed. This manual process is complicated and leads to dependency on each other. This is another area where automation comes handy. It generates reports that testers can view to know what other testers have done,  what scripts have been written, what all tests have been performed by other testers and what bugs were found and fixed.

Reduced Business Cost and High ROI

It’s true that automation testing is initially more expensive than manual testing. However, once the automated test cases are written, you will need minimal human resources to run them and monitor the execution of those test cases on a frequent basis. So, after a few weeks, the cost of test automation significantly comes down and becomes much cheaper than manual testing. Also, as automation testing can be performed as soon as development starts, the bugs can be identified and fixed much earlier in the development stage. This greatly helps in reducing the time-to-market and launching a bug-free software fast, which maximizes ROI for businesses. This is very important for startups as the inability to deliver bug-free releases quickly can lead them to suffer huge losses. 

Scalability

Scaling manual testing requires more resources and time. CTO and founders must understand that things change drastically when the number of users surge from 500 initially to 50,000 eventually. You need to do smoke testing, load testing and performance testing to ensure that your app works perfectly for all your users located in different parts of the world. With scalable QA automation, you can maximize the outcomes of automating your test procedures, increase test execution speed and test coverage. Salability in automation enables you to expand your automated testing environment and meet the quality expectations of your customers using various devices, operating systems and browsers.

As automation technology continues to advance, test automation will aid startups in even more ways in the future. I hope the points above have helped you understand how automation testing benefits business startups by accelerating release cycle and increasing ROI. Automation testing brings big opportunities for startups and our independent software testing company can help you build big on that.

Evon Technologies, a software development company in India, also offers test automation services to deliver a high-quality software product with reduced time to market. Our QA team uses sophisticated test automation tools such as Selenium, Sahi, Appium, TestComplete, Cucumber, and more for faster test execution and accurate results. Our range of automation testing services includes GUI test automation with reusable frameworks, data-driven test automation, keyword driven test automation, white box testing, CLI based test automation and more. We know how important it is to strike a right balance between manual and automation testing to derive best results, and you can hire a perfect mix from us. Startups are dream projects and we as a startup accelerator help entrepreneurs not just build software products fast but also ensure top-notch quality in them with the aid of our highly talented and experienced QA team. Do you want to get in touch with us for your startup project? Share your requirements here or Email us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and we promise to get back to you shortly with software development and testing solutions we are proud of.