In this uncertain time as your team decreases, as a QA manager, you may be tasked to be lean and continue building quality E2E software tests. Time is of the essence and depending on a manual regression strategy won’t work. Therefore, taking account of TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) in your UI test with codeless automation is vital for your success. The question, how do you achieve these objectives with modern UI testing tools?

Here is the problem…

Generally hiring good QA/Test engineers (SET/SDET) is tough because these roles are few and rare in the market. Most teams cannot afford to dedicate a software developer to the testing team. SET and SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) roles can multi-task and write code, test code, and fix it.

In the shadow of COVID-19, it can be difficult to retain the entire coding and testing staff your firm once had. Therefore, an easy to use regression process that can be automated is vital during these times.

If you are a QA manager, you need to consider a reduction in your QA cost severely. One of the best ways you can reduce cost is through time savings benefits of automation. Some automation software can be cumbersome to set up. And even if your application dynamically changes, you need software that can automatically learn of these pivots. Using AI-powered automation testing software can be the answer to your problem thus maximizing return on investment (ROI.)

What is TCO?

TCO stands for Total Cost of Ownership. In software development, this is the total direct and indirect costs associated with a product or service. Knowing, and calculating all costs (even hidden associated costs) is a vital analytic of ROI calculation.

Here is a typical example of software development. The below figures take account of the total costs, including hidden costs of product development in the life cycle:

20% in product development (Visible costs upfront)

• UI/UX design
• Initial development
• Beta testing

80% comes when the product is in the market (Hidden costs upfront)

• Additional development
• Regression testing
• Marketing
• Support

Based on the above breakdown, let’s examine regression testing of UI for total cost of ownership. What is the TCO of UI testing you may ask?

• The most time consuming and resource-intensive portion of software development is regression testing. The man-hour cost here adds up!
• That includes the initial creation of tests. Maintenance, keeping up with infrastructure, managing test data, test quality assurance, etc.

For these reasons, it is wise that you build a UI test foundation in your organization (system infrastructure, procedure, etc.) First, start by creating initial test cases for existing UI. However, one pain point with many software solutions is when there are changes to the user interface. This adds more man-hours for a QA manager in manually adjusting testing scripts. Autify rids this worry as it has artificial intelligence to learn of changes for you, and can adapt. Furthermore, there is no fiddling with maintaining scripts as this is a nocode solution. It is as simple as recording your initial script and running thereafter.

Automated regression testing on ever-changing user interfaces is a difficult task. Most development teams recognize the importance of regression testing, yet efficient teams understand the importance of intelligence in automated testing to account for frequently changing UI.

So how do you reduce your UI Test TCO? You can hire lower cost third party resources i.e. outsourcing, offshore testers, etc. However, these resources may not be effective as maintenance costs can grow over time.

What about UI Test automation? Many QA managers are familiar with testing frameworks such as Selenium and Cypress. These are great frameworks, however, they pose challenges. Here is a list of benefits and drawbacks:

Pros

• These are Open Source Software (OSS), therefore no license fees.
• There is a wealth of online articles and resources to support the product(s)

Cons

• Framework such as Selenium may be hard to maintain because you have to write code for test scripts.
• OSS are great solutions, however, your engineers need to be familiar or be experienced with the software.
• OSS tends to require more engineering resources rather than managed services.
• Cypress supports Chrome and omits other browser support (and lacks core functionalities.)

The web has evolved, and so should testing. Using modern UI Test automation is the equivalent of QA Automation SaaS. There are other players in the codeless E2E (end-to-end) testing space. Yet Autify, offers the easiest and more intuitive solution on the market. Getting started is as simple as:

1. Installing the Autify Chrome extension
2. Record a test case on the web app
3. Run an automated test on the console
4. If there is a UI change, it is automatically detected by its AI, so minor changes on UI doesn’t require test case changes

Conclusion

In this article, we have discussed several topics on how you can reduce TCO in software development using AI-based automation software. Sure you can hire cheaper resources, however, leveraging software like Autify can significantly improve manual time wasted running regression tests. It solves many pain points of E2E testing including execution time and compatibility. Furthermore, it is nocode testing so no learning a programming language to start or modify tests. To reduce your TCO of UI tests dramatically, I recommend trying modern QA automation SaaS, such as Autify.