What are the limitations of automation testing?

Some people debate that manual testing is more thorough because testers are looking for different errors than automated tests are capable of finding. Others argue that sometimes human testers are more insightful when they discover things that machines cannot see.

This blog post discusses what some limitations might exist for automation testing and how you can work around them if needed.

Development and maintenance time

One of the biggest potential downsides to automation testing is the time required to set it up and test it. If there are many different changes that need to be made in a test, then you'll have to complete all the manual testing in order to verify that the new automated tests cover them correctly. In the end, your quality metrics will suffer.

Another limitation is that not all automated tests are designed for continuous integration systems, and so you may need to commit significant amounts of time to manually doing your tests before you can start to use automation.

To give an example, most of the automated test frameworks do not work with continuous integration systems, and you may need to test each and every feature manually in your environment before you can complete a continuous integration build to check that your automated tests are passing as expected.

TestProject supports any CI/CD workflow your development team has, whether it is Jenkins, Bamboo, Travis, CircleCI, AWS, or Google's automated deployment. With TestProject, you can choose the one that works best for you.

However, if the developers can't finish the work because of resource constraints, then you'll need to set up the continuous integration system and manually make sure that the automated tests pass, which will take more time.

Integration between test automation and manual testing

If you work with test automation frameworks, then the manual testing methods work well with the framework. However, you'll still need to test your application using these other manual testing methods to make sure that your application is working as expected.

For some of the tests to be successful, you'll also need to run some of your test automation tasks manually, such as verification of module functionality, architecture reviews, and code refactoring. You will need to ensure that the changes in your code work as expected. This is true whether you use the automated test framework or some other manual testing method.

Test management time

Automation tests are run when the code is checked into the repository, which means that you need to run them again when the code is checked into production. You'll need to run them again when you need to re-configure your development environment.

If you want to run the tests manually, then you'll need to do so at any time. That means that you'll have to run them when your developers check out the code and go into production. In the same way, you'll need to run your tests manually when the product is updated.

As you can see, these processes are time-consuming and costly. You'll also need to make sure that your automated tests are still functional when the manual testing process is complete.

Software quality metrics

The output of automated tests is a software quality metric. Some companies focus on metrics related to software testing, while others focus on metrics related to user acceptance testing, defect detection, and defect resolution. You'll also need to test that your metrics are accurate, since they may not match the output of your automated tests.

Automated tests also help you to measure your team's quality by showing your developers the flow of traffic through the application's lifecycle. Some continuous integration platforms use automated tests to display the performance of each commit that is merged into the repository.

In general, it's better to have an understanding of how automated testing is used within your development process than to follow the recommendations of some generic framework for test automation.

Rather, you'll need to decide what you need to do to make sure that your application will be successful. For example, you may decide that you'll use automated testing to create dashboards for the user flow. Or, you may decide to use automated testing to create high-fidelity simulations of the user flow.