Manual versus Automated Testing

If you are a small development shop, you probably wonder if you should be using an automated UI testing tool. Manual testing does the job, albeit with tedious, error-prone techniques that often fail to catch all UI problems before a release. Eventually, this might turn to be quite costly to your business. In addition, the time your team spends re-running the same set of tests before each release will hardly bring to your business any retained value, especially in the long run. 

First thing that comes to mind, however, is that automated tests are usually associated with larger budget, more resources and time to get started which you can rarely afford to spend. 

This is not always the case, though. The use of automated testing tools is highly recommended in regards to saving time and cash. For example, if you have to execute complex Testcases which need to be run many times, test automation will surely help your team save time and efforts. Automation also helps performing "compatibility tests” - testing the software on different configurations. Also, when performing regressions on code that is continuously changing, automated testing is a huge gain to shorter the time. Finally, automated tests can run on different machines, thus decreasing your team’s testing time.

Naturally, it only makes sense to use automated testing tools when the cost of acquiring the tool and building and maintaining the tests is less than the efficiency gained from the effort. If you use a superior automated testing tool, your ROI will be indisputably higher, and regression coverage will be guaranteed. You can make your team times more productive by arming them with a professional, yet easy-to-use tool – Telerik Test Studio. Getting started with Test Studio is easy – a couple of short videos are all your team will need to begin creating powerful, maintainable UI tests. More importantly, you’ll see productivity increase thanks to Test Studio’s browser abstraction which allows for a test to be recorded once and played against multiple browsers without any additional overhead.