The Impacts of Test Automation on Software's Cost, Quality and Time to Market

In spite of the availability of most proficient quality assurance teams and tools, software testing has always been a time-consuming task. Thus test automation is being profoundly practiced in most of the software industries to leverage the total development time. Although the test automation has its own advantages and disadvantages and it influences various other development phases, the higher management is particularly interested in reckoning its effects on total software's cost, quality and time. In this paper, we have tried to ascertain some of the critical factors related to test automation and cost/return of/from automation. As automation is itself a pricy activity, it requires development effort and significant time, we have attempted to enumerate test automation's impacts on software's cost, time and quality on three different softwares. The results of our experiments clearly show the positive effects of test automation on cost, quality and time to market of the software.