The Role of QA Automation in the SDLC [Food for Thought]

Quality assurance automation covers monotonous, time-consuming tests - you know, the ones that cause us humans to zone out (and therefore make the occasional mistake).

Automating those simple, repetitive tasks allows manual testers to spread their wings and focus on more complex, exploratory testing. 

In this episode of Food for Thought, Automation Engineer Tim Sibiski explains the importance of incorporating quality assurance automation into your software development lifecycle.

Give it a watch below. 

The Highlights:

If your application will be growing continually, you'll absolutely want to implement automation into your testing cycle. Why? With every new iteration of your app, there will be more testing. Each time, manual testers would have to go back and test nearly every aspect of your app over again. With automation, you won't have this exponential increase in testing effort, and you won't need to hire more and more manual testers each iteration to keep up. In short, testing becomes much more scalable. 

Layers of Defense Against a Buggy Release (from fastest to slowest):

1. Unit tests
2. API tests
3. Automation
4. Manual Testers

By adding API tests and automation to your testing cycle, you'll catch the easier-to-find issues early on, saving your manual testers - and your team as a whole - a lot of time. 

In each episode of Food for Thought, we give one of our Mindgrub experts five minutes or less to make us an expert on an important part of their job. In exchange, they're rewarded with their favorite snack (it's quite literally "food" for "thought").

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