The average cost of software defects, according to research by the Standish Group, ranges between $5 and $10 million per project. According to Microsoft, 70 percent of projects suffer from some kind of software defect; that’s an abysmal failure rate! Clearly, these numbers indicate that there’s no room for software testing or quality assurance (QA) to be an afterthought in your software development process. In fact, it’s so important that you can’t afford to skip it if you want your automation efforts to be successful!

You can’t test an automated system without testing the software first

Software testing is the foundation for automation because you can’t test an automated system without testing the software first. Even if you use a third-party tool, it needs to be tested before it can be used in your business. You don’t want to find yourself in a situation where you need to fix errors that would have been caught during testing. The best way to avoid this problem is with good quality assurance practices that include software testing.

Test early and often

You can’t skip software testing if you want automation success. For one thing, a test early and often strategy will be more cost-effective, but it’s also important because bugs are inevitable. The earlier you find and fix the bugs, the less time and money is lost down the road. There are many different types of tests to perform as well: unit tests, integration tests, regression tests, and system-level acceptance tests. And in order to ensure your software will work as desired in all conditions, these should be performed on multiple devices with varying capabilities.

Test at different levels

One of the most important aspects of software testing is to test at different levels. Too many times, people only focus on one level or type of test and don’t account for the other levels that need to be covered. For automation success, it’s imperative that you not only test at the system level but also at the unit level and integration level. At each of these levels, there are additional tests that must be done in order to get a complete picture.

Keep your tests up to date

Software testing is a vital part of automation that can help you maintain success. The more your software changes and grows, the more important it is to keep your tests up to date. That way, if something goes wrong in your code, you’ll know exactly what changed and when. And it’s a good idea to have enough tests so that any change will be caught.
The more automated tasks you’re running, the more critical these updates are. For example, on one team I worked with, we had over 20 automated tasks spanning four different systems – at one point we had only 18 passing out of those 20! It was obvious we needed some major updates just by looking at our stats alone.

Automate your tests

Software testing for automation is important because it can help you increase your efficiency while running tests. With automation, you don’t have to worry about mundane tasks like inputting data or waiting for scripts to run. This makes your time more valuable and allows you to focus on bigger tasks, like finding bugs in your system and writing test cases. Test cases are very important as they’re what allow us to identify problems in our software, making them the key to successful product development.
You’ll be able to save hours of time by skipping this part of software development.
This will also help your automated tests go more smoothly by not having errors with smaller details like syntax errors and minor changes.