Today we are excited to bring you a guest blog post from Antony Edwards, CTO at TestPlant. QASymphony announced a technology partnership with TestPlant on July 12, 2016. To read more about the partnership, click here.

Test automation is a no-brainer. That doesn’t mean that all testing should be automated, clearly exploratory and other manual testing have an important place in any test strategy, but some test automation can clearly deliver benefits to any software team. So why is less than 25% of the world’s testing automated? We believe the problem is not motivation, it’s execution.

Successful Test Strategies

TestPlant has spent a lot of time investigating why test automation projects succeed and why they fail. Very simply we found two key factors that differentiate successful and unsuccessful projects. Successful projects:

• Are managed like projects. They have goals, a plan, and a team.
• Include people who have successfully deployed test automation before.

Sounds obvious of course, but the fact is that the majority of test automation projects we’ve ever seen (using any tool) fail one or both of these criteria.

This is exactly why TestPlant has teamed-up with QASymphony. If you’re going to manage your test automation properly you need a test management tool. Again it’s obvious, but we still see so many teams struggling with inadequate complex spreadsheets or heavy-weight ALM tools that require a lot of effort from testers with little benefit. We wanted to be able to recommend to our users a great test management tool that provides flexibility (e.g. manual testing and automation, integration with popular ALM tools), but is easy to use, and most importantly helps them clearly manage their testing with low management overhead. That’s qTest.

But if you’re reading this on QASymphony’s website you probably already know this! 

Why Test Automation?

So why test automation? Hopefully, you already see the benefits of test automation. Especially in a cross-platform world, and when release cycles are measured in weeks (or even hours) rather than years, manual testing is just infeasible for the bulk of your testing. From manufacturing to omni-channel retail the benefits of test automation have been proven over-and-over.

Why eggPlant? eggPlant is designed to help you be successful with test automation, i.e. quickly and easily create reliable cross-platform test automation scripts, which is why eggPlant was recently rated #1 for mobile and responsive web testing by Gartner (critical capabilities report).

The combination of qTest and eggPlant gives you the best start for successful agile testing.
For a full report on how to set up a successful test automation project, read here.