Shifting to Automated Software Testing Amidst The Economic Downturn

Ensuring excellent CSAT is a must for all companies today—the reason why companies lay extensive focus on testing applications efficiently. As consumers are not ready to settle for poor app performances and functionalities, organizations are aiming to improve testing processes to streamline and optimize testing workflows and their outcomes. However, the current economic downswing has been a major threat to several organizations hindering their existing software testing workflows.

To better address the impact of the economic downturn, organizations must shift to efficient automation methodologies and thereby improve overall testing and deliver superior quality digital products.

What is automated testing?

Automated testing refers to the testing technique which requires specific app tools to control, execute and monitor the test execution and further evaluate the test outcomes with predicted ones. The tests are automated through specialized tools, and therefore the testing process requires minimal or no human intervention.

What are the critical scenarios when automated tests should be performed?

Following are some of the scenarios when automated software testing is the most helpful —

• Projects where testing requirements do not change frequently.

• A situation where timely delivery of the product is critical.

• High turn-over projects

• Testing or load and performance of the app for the vast user base

The importance of automated software testing amidst the global recession across different industries

Delivering optimal customer satisfaction is a top priority, and enterprises are consistently trying to streamline their testing processes. Manually executing the testing is often daunting and can lead to poor product quality, length of release cycles, poor customer experience, and decreasing ROI. Moreover, with the economic downturn, organizations are often aiming to cut down costs which in turn is negatively impacting the app quality and brand reputation. The domino effect of an economic downswing often leads to slow sales and steep profit drops as the companies try to reduce investments in required tools and human resources that deteriorate the quality of software applications built and the experiences they render.

By automating a series of repetitive and time-consuming testing processes, automated software testing allows testers to accelerate the release cycles, reduce human effort and improve the efficiency, accuracy, and reliability of testing while being able to tackle the financial constraints.

Automated testing in the BFSI industry

How does the economic downturn impact the industry?

When it comes to the BFSI industry, each and every task has witnessed an immense transformation in recent years, especially with the covid outbreak. The interactions between banking and financial institutions and consumers are becoming more and more digital. Additionally, the economic recession has led to organizations making budget compromises and imposing several layoffs in different departments to handle the financial crisis better. This has caused a major deterioration in the investments made for crucial tools and equipment for testing as well as skilled human resources.

At this crux, it is imperative for BFSI organizations to shift to automated testing to ensure that the critical activities are executed as expected while maintaining complete security, guaranteeing that the crucial modules of the BFSI apps are appropriately integrated and overall costs are optimized.

How does automated testing help?

• Achieving agility

The BFSI companies have complex and integrated applications and legacy systems that control business-critical processes. These applications are continually evolving to cater to the customer demands of the new digital world. Test automation drives agile transformation for businesses to help manage the changes and pursue emerging market opportunities while ensuring reduced costs.

• Improved performance of QA

Automated testing helps QA teams to be agile and efficient. By leveraging automation, QA teams can respond more proactively in case of bugs or error detection in banking applications on the one hand and tackle the financial constraints effectively on the other.

• Regression testing

As software applications undergo a transformation in terms of their updates and new version releases, automated testing simplifies the process of regression testing to ensure that the app performs seamlessly post the changes. Without automation, often regression testing is overlooked or down-prioritized, which leads to more bugs, poor releases, and unsatisfactory experiences. With automated testing, QA teams can test faster and more accurately and identify the glitches proactively.

• Faster release cycles

By enabling companies to find bugs easily and faster at the early stages of development and deployment, automated testing makes the entire process faster. The developing teams, designers, and other project stakeholders obtain reliable feedback regarding the software quality, making it smoother for teams to take necessary actions proactively. As a result, organizations can accelerate product release dates.

How HeadSpin helps BFSI companies to streamline automated testing efforts while addressing the economic downturn more efficiently?

By leveraging the HeadSpin solution, global BFSI organizations can streamline their banking app testing and reduce overall development costs while ensuring optimal user experience. The solution enables organizations to:

• Leverage Data Science to Get Insights into Application Performance

• Perform end-to-end testing across 90+ locations across the globe

• Automate customer user journeys

• Run build-over build regression to find performance regressions

• Access Test Data Easily Through Data Visualization Dashboards

• Capture user experience that involves biometric authentication and test facial recognition and fingerprint features

Automated testing in media

How does the economic downturn impact the industry?

To reduce costs and increase profitability amidst a situation of declining sales, businesses often decide to cut corners on human resources and software tools.

With automated software testing, media organizations can largely save their IT department costs and help drive business profitability. Automation enables organizations to leverage media products of any scale and audience. It perfectly fits the objectives of media streaming testing, considering the infinite diversity of features, environments, and other variables.

• Efficient cross-platform and cross-browser testing

Automated testing simplifies deep platform and browser coverage by combining the right automation tools, OTT testing expertise, and an effective team to cover the platform specifications.

• Enhanced test coverage

With the aid of automated testing, teams can ensure comprehensive media testing coverage, providing the stakeholders full confidence in the product's performance even in the most unfavorable situations.

• Improved scalability

Every now and then, a new media device or an OTT platform is launched in the market that requires development and testing teams to scale their testing efforts. Automated testing enables the teams to scale processes more efficiently with fewer resources.

• Higher ROI of testing

Automated media testing enables QA teams, and by selecting the right tools, teams can run several tests concurrently and at a much faster pace. This helps to accelerate the development cycle and boost the ROI.

How HeadSpin helps media and entertainment companies to streamline automated testing efforts while addressing the economic downturn more efficiently?

HeadSpin leverages AI and ML technologies to automate OTT and media content and device testing, enabling them to reduce overall operating costs and improve productivity.

The HeadSpin Platform helps media companies to streamline their OTT and media content and device testing by enabling them to:

• Collect video quality and streaming KPIs with a reference-free video MOS and audio match analysis.

• Record tests on TV

• Run tests on OTT media devices and test complex elements like DRM-protected content

• Playback media tests and analyze them with advanced video & audio analysis capabilities.

Automated testing in the telco industry

How does the economic downturn impact the industry?

During an economic downturn, organizations attempt to reduce labor costs in several ways, even beyond layoffs. Some companies freeze any new hiring, which creates major gaps in the skilled resources and causes poor productivity. In such situations, automated testing enables organizations to optimally utilize resources and automate crucial testing tasks while managing financial constraints. End-to-end automated testing to increase profitability across telcos and offers certain benefits like:

• Simplified monitoring of roaming performance client experience (both inbound and outbound)

• Seamless management of 5G experiences for users with faster and more accurate testing methodology.

• Improved cross-team collaboration across design, development, and testing domains that helps increase productivity and efficiency and thereby ensure optimal performance and user experience.

• Enhanced developers and CI/CD workflows that help to speed up delivery and deployment s and improve overall release cycles.

• Automated testing enables testers to identify bugs and defects early on. Errors that appear automatically create a report in the communication channels with the clients or for the tester to check and verify before passing it forward.

What does HeadSpin have to offer to the telco companies while addressing the economic downturn more efficiently?

HeadSpin's AI-driven Platform enables:

• Continuous QoE / QoS assessment framework - RF metrics & more

• Monitor roaming performance client experience - inbound & outbound

• Build better Digital Apps for User Experience & Cost Reduction

• Measure & monitor 5G experiences

• Drive/walk test for local experience – Cellular/WiFi handoff

• Test, monitor & analyze data, voice, and messaging services

Automated software testing in the gaming industry

How does the economic downturn impact the industry?

Gaming companies are considering revamping several processes and workflows and automating repetitive tasks to boost business efficiency, reduce overall costs and increase profits. Game development companies are aiming to carefully invest existing resources to keep pace with the advancing gaming technologies and efficient automated testing software to offer clients holistic and well-planned automated game testing.

These companies are focusing more and more on automated testing approaches today for the following benefits —

• Increasing efficiency in detecting bugs at early development stages

• Saving immense time and effort on QA that helps to deliver products on time

• Executing tests round the clock 24*7 hassle-free with minimal manual interference

• Evaluating and analyzing test results seamlessly.

• Increasing the accuracy of tests across multiple platforms helps to speed up test executions and adds greater value to game testing.

• Lowering business costs and optimizing human resource utilization in game development-related tasks.

• Maximizing test coverage for testing seamlessly and challenging game testing scenarios

‍How HeadSpin helps gaming companies to streamline automated testing efforts while addressing the economic downturn more efficiently?‍

The HeadSpin gaming solution companies improve gaming experiences by enabling them to:

• Measure & monitor network latency impacting gaming experiences

• Perform UX testing on real devices with recorded test sessions

• Measure audio-video quality using HS reference-free MOS score

• Analyze game performance & impact - FPS, CPU, memory & battery usage

• Perform KPI-based performance benchmarking to drive profitability and revenue

• Test & monitor in-app transaction performance and many more

How to perform automated testing?

Automation testing is primarily executed in the following manner —

1. Selecting a testing tool

The marketplace offers multiple development automated software test tools and platforms, and technologies. It is essential that organizations carefully choose the most suitable tool for their testing by considering the following key factors—

• The language in which the software is written

• The operating system it will operate on

• How will the test scripts be written

• What are the testing requirements

In several scenarios, testing experts recommend an automation proof of concept (POC) for choosing the right testing tool.

2. Defining the scope of test automation

For this step, testing teams need to know the essential features of the business, the scenarios that involve processing large amounts of data, the standard functions across different apps, the complexity of the test cases, and much more.

3. Planning, designing, and development

In this stage, the team devises an effective plan or strategy and implements it. The tools, test types, and frameworks are efficiently integrated into a schedule or timeline such that production continues according to the decided goals and objectives defined by the development teams.

4. Executing the test

Post the planning, tests are executed as per the automation plan schedule. Data is generated and collected for analyzing it as feedback.

5. Maintenance

However successful the testing process is, it is essential to maintain the existing and subsequent flow. New tests are added, performed, and maintained to help improve the results of every successive release.

Conclusion

Shifting to automation is imperative for organizations today in order to ensure faster, more reliable, and more accurate testing. As customers expect excellent app performances and experiences today, guaranteeing the same of the app is important to enhance brand reputation and retain the customer base. Selecting the right tool and efficiently executing the automated testing is crucial in this process to achieve the best outcomes.

An automated software testing solution like HeadSpin offers organizations to leverage the best testing solution for their applications and ensure flawless user experiences.