Automation is gaining inroads with 75% of organisations using a combination of automated and manual testing, but only 11% have a fully automated strategy, according to a report from Keysight.
For this report, Forrester conducted an online survey of 406 test operations decision-makers at organizations in North America; Europe, Middle East and Africa; Asia-Pacific.
Jeff Harris, VP of portfolio and global marketing at Keysight Technologies, the study revealed that companies feel pressure to do more test automation, especially when asked about the future.
With growing complexity, the number of tests is increasing (77%) and without automation, product development slows.
Harris said manual or partially automated strategies simply can’t keep up with the needs of organisations today, and without AI-powered automation, they will struggle to conquer testing complexities.
“Additionally, we expect the COVID pandemic to accelerate adoption of remote development, automated test sequencing,” he said. “We also expect a much higher use of digital twins as development teams strive to continue working together but from different locations.”
The primary technical challenges resulting from testing complexities are long cycles, accurately capturing bugs and issues, and then fixing them.
These problems directly impact business results and the product development process.
Respondents ranked the outcomes as security breach risk (51%); increased expenses (48%); slower time to market (42%); defective product (36%); and loss of revenue (34%).
However, enterprises recognise that manual and partially automated testing strategies cannot keep pace with the increasing complexity of products.
As a result, 45% will consider using a fully automated approach in the next three years, a 409% growth. Over half (52%) stated they would look at AI for integrating complex test suites, a 325% growth.
By shifting to intelligent automated testing strategies, organisations expect benefits.
Operational improvements anticipated by respondents include increased productivity (59%), ability to simulate product function or performance (54%) and bug fix automation or simulation to save time on fix-retest cycles (53%).
The anticipated business impact spans higher quality product that increases customer satisfaction (59%), the ability to reduce time to market (50%) and more agile product development cycles (50%).
As described in the survey, the most anticipated technology or operations improvements from automation and AI are increased productivity, ability to simulate product function/performance and bug fix automation/simulation.
