With the advancements in technology and effective service delivery for businesses, QA and Testing service providers are venturing into automation. Automation may take the lead in accuracy but what about the flexibility, out of the box solution that a human resource can offer. Automation may be useful for tasks that are repetitive and do not require much human interaction thus focusing on the area it is designed for. But what the other related area and the bugs surrounding it that it may missed out.

As part of cost-effectiveness strategy, companies may think that all tests should be automated as it’s a one-time effort and provides cheaper solution rather than spend on many resources working manually. How true this thought is? Creating and maintaining automation tests do require resources along with the cost of the tools, hence the above thought may be true for some cases but not always.

Test automation is a great idea for projects where product is developed and needs to be strengthened. It may not be the right thing to do with new product testing. For a new product under test, a careful combination of manual and automated tests should be used so that testing activity does not overlook bugs that may be unforeseen by the automation. It may turn out to be costly in case bugs get overlooked by automation and are detected at a later stage. To make automation more effective, test cases for all the error scenarios have to be designed separately and this may be additional costly effort.
Automation of tests has its own side-effects as lots of bug may be missed in automation thus impacting the quality of the released product which may lower the customer satisfaction if they come up with those bugs.
In the end we can conclude that a careful combination of manual and automation testing may be a good approach as they alone may not prove as effective as it should be.