The demand for websites with better performance, greater scalability, and faster release cycles are driving the standard for quality web development through the roof.
The growth of Jamstack is changing the way we think about workflow. Quality assurance is crucial during the Jamstack development lifecycle. It ensures that the final product delivers excellent usability, functionality, and performance.
Think of quality assurance (QA) as trying that spoonful of frosting before you decorate the cake. You’d want to make sure it tastes good before you potentially ruin a perfectly good cake, right? You may want to double check that you used sugar instead of accidentally pouring salt for a buttercream frosting? (I’m not a good baker.)
Implementing automated testing allows you to continuously find and correct any concerns or defects that could appear — quicker. The benefits of a solid automated testing strategy within your overall quality assurance plan not only mean a quicker time to market, but also include:
Before even thinking about an automation strategy, it's important to be able to calculate whether the return on investment (ROI) is worth the implementation.
First and foremost, let’s take a look at the math. The most commonly used formula for ROI, regardless of automated testing is the following:
ROI = Cost Savings / Investment Costs
The result of this calculation is typically represented as a percentage or a ratio. Seems simple, right? But it’s not. There are endless automated testing softwares out there to support an organization and to improve the quality of the end product. Some are free, some are open source, and some cost a fortune. Here’s a better visual.
I know this is a vague example, however, you can see how quantitative the cost savings are based on time reduction. There are qualitative savings, too Let’s break it down by qualitative cost savings and well, and you can figure out the best ROI based on which products best suit your needs.
Manual testers are human. Even the best manual testers won’t catch everything. If there is a complex use case, faults can occur. On the flip side, automated tests can execute tests with 100 percent accuracy as the expectation would be that they consistently produce the same results.
“Shifting left” means moving the test process to an earlier point in the development cycle. So if you’re currently testing in prod, try shifting one development cycle over to the left, and test on a deploy preview or demo environment. Moving the activity of creating tests to the left of the development cycle also forces the clear definition of features and user paths. Test automation injected earlier means detection of defects sooner, which leads to faster delivery, reducing context-switching, and ultimately a better product.
Automated testing can determine the stability of your build. Smoke testing (also known as build verification testing) is performed to verify the critical functionalities of a website pre or post feature launch. But it can be slow and requires manual input from QA. Smoke testing is an example of a manual test that,in some cases, could justify being automated. The goal here would be to release a feature as fast as possible and automatically validate its stability.
A manual test for every feature change could take hours to review. In other words, every time there is a change to the codebase, the tester has to spend time re-testing everything to ensure the proper functionality. Instead of relying on manual testing, there could be situations where it makes sense to employ automated tests.
It goes without saying that by implementing automated testing best practices, your organization will not only save time and money, but also deliver higher quality products to the clients and ultimately, end users. Ready to see what Ample can do for you? Check us out!
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