The Need for Speed With Quality
The slow speed of feedback to the dev team through the results of manual tests decreases productivity significantly. Re-executing manual tests in every iteration of SDLC is not a sustainable pattern in current world. There is never enough time, and adding more personnel to execute manual regression tests leads to reduced returns. Test effectiveness is a critical aspect to keep up with the faster-paced development life cycles so that sufficient quality of the system can be ensured and time and money can be saved. To have better test effectiveness, we need to think differently with the increasing adoption of agile and DevOps practices. We need to have automations in all layers of the test pyramid. This includes unit tests, component tests/service tests, and UI tests.
Finding the Right Set of Tests
The number of new features, and therefore the number of tests, increases significantly after a few iterations in almost all agile teams. The only way to keep up with the needed regression testing is to automate the right set of tests to ensure the change hasn’t impacted existing functionality. Realistically, we can’t test everything, and we can’t automate all our tests. So, we need to find the right balance. To accomplish this balance, mature DevOps teams use a combination of test automation and manual exploratory testing, both running in a continuous pattern.