Posted by Santa Rose, USA: For enterprises, the problem is that manual and partially automated testing strategies cannot keep pace with the increasing complexity of products. Henceforth, automated testing remains a significant challenge for organisations revealed a Keysight commissioned global study conducted by Forrester to understand the state of test strategies and technologies.
The report titled ‘Conquer Testing Complexities with Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI),’ identified that automation is gaining inroads, with 75% of organisations using a combination of automated and manual testing. However, only 11% have a fully automated strategy. With growing complexity, the number of tests is increasing (77%) and without automation, product development slows.
“We learned in the study that companies feel pressure to do more test automation, especially when asked about the future. 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,” said Jeff Harris, VP – Portfolio and Global Marketing, Keysight Technologies,
“We expect the COVID pandemic to accelerate adoption of remote development, automated test sequencing. We also expect a much higher use of digital twins as development teams strive to continue working together but from different location,” added Harris.
“At Keysight, we’re building this automation of intelligence across the workflow into our entire software product portfolio to address these needs and drive test and validation automation forward,” informed Harris.
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 recognize 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 per the survey, the most anticipated technology or operations improvements from automation and AI have increased productivity, the ability to simulate product function/performance and bug fix automation/simulation.