7 Benefits of Automated QA for Retail
The purpose of quality assurance is to prevent a defective product from entering the market. It’s important for saving time, providing the best quality for your customers, and protecting the reputation of your business. Without QA, you have to blindly trust that nothing will go wrong.
One of the problems with quality assurance is the amount of time and manpower required to get it right. Investing in automated QA means letting AI take on some of that responsibility.
Here are some of the benefits of quality assurance automation for your business.
1. Faster Feedback
New retail technology is all about speeding up the process so employees can move on to more important work. Automating QA allows a quicker feedback cycle that improves and speeds up a product’s overall development. Without test automation, actually getting feedback can take a while since it relies on an individual person.
With improvements in AI, you can now rely on automated QA to let your team know if there are any bugs or problems early on. Your team can then work on correcting those errors instead of needing to find them in the first place.
2. Reduced Expenses
Assuring quality in your products means keeping an eye out for any defects in them. Before automated QA came along, that literally included people looking for problems and reporting them. Those people need to be vetted, hired, and paid a salary with benefits to do their jobs.
Modern technology allows for automation to some extent in almost every industry in the world. While these programs do cost money to install and maintain, they won’t require health insurance or a paid vacation.
With the right setup, you should be able to complete a project without requiring any sort of manual testing. Not only do you save money but you can also reallocate your workforce to other areas that need more support.
3. Increased Coverage
Manual testing can provide a more discerning eye for any problems. However, it does limit how many tests can be verified in a period of time.
Write new tests and add them to your automated test suite to improve your coverage. An experienced developer can also write more complex tests that otherwise may get overlooked in manual tests.
Additionally, quality assurance automation tools can be integrated with other systems to facilitate communication between them. Instead of manually inputting data after a test, your software will record information as it works.
4. Improved Insights
When a test fails, the tester has to figure out why it did. Depending on the problem, it could take a while to reach a resolution. Automated QA provides better insights in those situations because it’s connected to the system.
For example, automated QA can show you the memory contents, data tables, file contents, and other information that can help a developer see what’s causing the issue.
You can also count on automated software to catch problems that may get overlooked by manual testers.
5. Better Quality
Human error is always going to be a factor when it comes to any line of work. It’s even more common when a person is dealing with something more complicated that requires a more discerning eye. That’s why processes go through multiple checks in case someone missed something or misdiagnosed a problem.
By automating QA, you can help to minimize and potentially eliminate those errors. Execute tests with 100-percent accuracy since they produce the same result every time. Tweak them as needed to account for any changes.
Some automated testing kits also come with additional features, such as a stress test to simulate heavy web traffic.
6. Risk Mitigation
Not much is worse than having a big rollout for your product and having multiple customers contact you immediately afterward with complaints about a major bug or technical issue. When that happens, your quality assurance is at least partly to blame for not catching it beforehand.
If an automated test fails, your team can immediately fix it. This can save you from needing to roll back a product and potentially losing customers.
Test automation can also work on multiple platforms at once if they’re connected.
Retail stores can sync up their quality assurance AI with point of sale systems to prevent user error. In fact, one of the top POS priorities among North American retailers has been omnichannel capabilities integration.
7. Better Manual Testing
While automated testing can eliminate the need for manual testing, it also frees up time for employees to test things that can’t be automated. For example, automated QA works with very specific commands that can easily be replicated. However, people and other pieces of software don’t always work predictably.
Manual testing should only be done where it’s needed, though. This includes exploratory testing, visual and UI tests, and reviewing essential parts of the code.
It’s important to continue relying on automated QA where possible. Once you’ve performed manual testing, you can cross-check the outcome using automated tools.
Utilize Automated QA
Quality assurance is one of the most important steps in preparing a product for the market. Retail technology, in particular, needs to be dependable or it could cost the company a lot of money. Automated QA provides ample opportunity to reliably check for any bugs or issues without taking a person away from another equally important project.
RedIron has been working in the retail industry for over 20 years now, and we provide tech and solutions to fill all your retail needs. Contact us to speak with a representative and schedule a demo today.
