What Are the Benefits of Low-Code Software Testing?
Effective testing that meets the monthly, or even weekly, release cycles of developed and packaged software is exerting business-critical pressure. Leading organizations look into traditional test automation for the execution cycle of functional and non-functional testing. However, this increases operating complexity and costs within an organization’s test team, as new technical skills are needed to develop, run, and maintain automation assets for the unit, API consumption, and regression testing.
This has led CIOs to consider how they scale their testing teams to meet business demand without a spiraling increase in cost and complexity. Low-code software testing enables organizations to empower citizen testers through the use of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, such as natural language processing (NLP), to compress testing cycles, increase the velocity and quality of testing, and provide faster feedback. They allow organizations to scale their testing capability without disproportionately increasing headcount, maintenance, and management costs. Low-code software testing tools, as seen in Figure 1 below, provide an operational step change that can significantly reduce time and effort.
Figure 1: Benefits of Low-Code Testing Software over Traditional Approaches
It is clear that low-code software testing can improve upon the common benefits of traditional test automation and address many of its limitations. To this end, low-code software testing provides a range of key benefits that address scale, accuracy, coverage, and complexity, such as:
- Citizen testers: A low-code software testing tool uses natural language processing (NLP) to allow anyone to automate tests. By expressing test intent in simple English, the tool generates and executes a script in a matter of minutes. It allows a community of non-technical citizen testers to reduce “test fatigue” and scale test coverage.
- Accelerate test creation: A skilled test engineer can create up to two test scripts per day using traditional test automation. A low-code software testing tool can increase that by a factor of four to five for both technical and non-technical testers.
- Autonomous maintainability: A manual maintenance burden exists where testers can spend between 25% to 40% of their time fixing previously working test scripts. Low-code testing software can reduce this burden by up to 90% by leveraging artificial intelligence to detect changes and heal test scripts autonomously.