Test automation is vital for forward-thinking financial services organizations that want to move away from reliance on manual testing to improve operational efficiency.
Automation allows for more testing in less time, expands an organization’s testing coverage, and increases the productivity of development, testing and QA resources, while at the same time delivering more reliable and accurate test results.
Additionally, the transition toward high-quality test automation helps financial services organizations to better meet the needs of their evolving customer base, stay competitive with industry disruptors, and adhere to increasingly complex legal and regulatory requirements.
To gain these benefits, financial service organizations are investing the time and money to acquire the tools and technology that facilitate test automation. To maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) from these investments it is important to measure results and track progress against automation targets.
In this blog, we are going to take a look at five test automation metrics that will give you the insights to understand how your organization is progressing and identify key areas for additional improvement.
1 - Automatable test cases
This is a measure of the percentage of test cases that can be automated. For most organizations, automating 80 percent of tests is a great target.
Here at Paragon, we strongly recommend that you start by automating the most common test scenarios that make up the majority of your testing work. These tests are the easiest to automate and will save the greatest amount of time for your business. Once you have these basic tests automated, you can move on to automating more complex tests and other process improvements.
Automatable test case % = (the number of automatable tests / the number of total tests) x 100
2 - Total test duration
This measures how long it takes to run your tests. This is significant as it can help you to identify bottlenecks in your testing and QA process, enabling you to improve performance moving forward. It’s important to note that this isn’t a measure of test quality, just a measure of time.
You will need to run this analysis on both the manual and automated tests so that you can more easily compare the “before and after” results to understand the time saving provided by automation.
Total time to run a suite of Manual Tests - Total time to run the same suite using Automation = Time Savings
It is important to note that the time savings is cumulative. Once tests are automated, they can be run and rerun against with little or no incremental cost.
3 - Test pass rate
This metric calculates the number of tests that have passed. This is not only important for you to understand how many tests are failing, it also helps you to identify where there are false failures within your testing process.
Test pass rate % = (number of cases that passed / number of test cases executed) x 100
This is another calculation to run on both the manual and automated tests so that you can compare the “before and after” results to understand the improvement gained via automation.
4 - Automation progress
This metric measures the total number of test cases that have been automated over time to track how well your organization is progressing against your overall automation target.
Automation progress % = (number of test cases automated / number of test cases automable) x 100
5 - Automation stability
All tests degrade over time. In conjunction with pass rate, automation stability is used to indicate potential issues that exist within your automated tests. Tracking this metric will help identify when test scripts may need to be adjusted or recalibrated.
By tracking automation stability over time, your business will be able to identify whether the accuracy of your tests is increasing or decreasing. You can use this information to make changes that improve the productivity of your testing environment.
Automation stability = number of failures / number of executions for each test
Are you interested in learning more about the benefits of test automation, and the metrics you can use to measure its performance? Get in touch with Paragon Application Systems today. Our team of payment test automation experts would love to help.
