Search

Sunday 9 September 2012

Test Automation ROI calculation Part 1 : Simple iterative development model

Introduction

The test automation isn't done just for fun. It has the purpose. Some of the main purposes are:
  • Increase testing team capacity
  • Minimize testing cycle without changing testing team capacity
  • Increase testing coverage without extra resources
  • Minimize human factor
But all above and many other benefits can be expressed with the single phase. Test automation should bring the profit. In other words, I have many ways to improve the testing efforts and each of them require some investment. Either I can hire more people or I can invest into some software/hardware which helps me making things faster. But if the investment into some improvement doesn't bring the profit this investment is useless. This is related to test automation as well. Yes, you can buy some expensive tools, you can build the complex infrastructure but if I can do the same in some other way which requires less investment I'll prefer the second option. So, before proposing some test automation efforts we should realize what the advantage we should make with this. One of the wide spread measure is the Return of investment. So, how should we calculate that for test automation project? Let's build some process model to see what we can calculate there.