What is a true Automation Test ROI?

 Bet you already know all the potential Automation Testing benefits. However, unfortunately, it is impossible to give you a whole picture without mentioning the basics, but let's do it quickly ;) 

Here are the most important ones: 

- Spending fewer hours on repetitive testing

Your QA team will spends their time just to check issues that can only be tested manually. Meantime, all the repetitive and routine work (for example integration and regression testing) is performed automatically. 

- Getting to the release stage faster. 

The fun thing about automation tests is that you don't need to wait till QA will get their hands on a new feature/change to find that something is not working after the deployment. Automated tests simply won't allow this to be delivered. It means that your team avoids all the back and forth as the developer that was working on this part immediately sees a problem and where it occurs.  

- Avoiding losing talent. 

It makes it easier for your testers to get the job done and increases employee retention rate by saving them from burnout. In simple words - you won’t need to bear the cost of losing talent.

With all of that said, let's sum it up, and define three key points that allow us to calculate the Automation Tests ROI 

- Time spent on testing. We are not restricted by 8 hours working day. Needless to say, you don't need to pay hourly once automation tests are running. Spend more time on testing and pay less.

- Number of tests performed per hour. Usually, this metric can be increased up to 5x. With tests automation, you can cover larger parts of the product without actual QA working on it. 

- Cost of change or bug fix. To fix bugs that were found earlier in the development cycle costs significantly less. Defects in code found after the release can cost up to 10x more to fix than those detected during unit testing.

Surely, automation initially requires more time and skills to implement. This means you'll need a more qualified and highly paid specialist at the start.  But in long-term perspective - it will save much more time and free the costs for an actual development of the product, and introducing new value to your customers. Just as much as it helps increasing your reputation by working proactively instead of fixing bugs and risking losing it.