When you’re building software, new features will get added, old ones will get updated, and sometimes a small change can accidentally cause bigger problems somewhere else in the app. That’s where automated testing comes in. They run in the background, validate that your frontend and backend still work, and quickly alert your development team if something goes wrong. It’s a practical, common sense approach to maintaining an app while keeping development streamlined.
In the sections below, we’ll walk through what automated testing is, why it matters, and how teams can build smart testing strategies that keep applications stable.
Automated Testing Overview
Automated tests remove the repetitive, manual parts of quality assurance (QA), including testing the infrastructure, source code, and even the UI of your application. When done correctly, automated tests ensure the following:
- No regressions in functionality: Automated testing prevents features that are currently working in your app from stopping after a deployment. These tests will fail, which provides feedback for your developers to resolve issues before they can leak into production. As a result, automated tests help maintain continuity across all your development environments for your application.
- Faster development: Because code is written and tested for existing and newly added features, automated tests provide developers with a faster feedback cycle. That means development teams can build and deploy code faster without spending excessive time manually reviewing it. In fact, automated tests can reduce QA time efforts by as much as 50% or more.
The downside of automation is higher upfront costs. However, it pays off in the long run for complex apps and high-risk industries like health and finance, where mistakes can cost millions. Next, let’s dive into strategies for building successful test automations.
Automated Testing Strategies for Better App Development
When developing an automated testing program, consider the following for a better outcome:
- Form a team: One of the most common team structures is to have a dedicated QA and SDET (software development engineer in test) within your project/organization:
- The QA mainly focuses on manual testing. Some parts of the application may require manual testing, such as business logic.
- The SDET focuses on designing, developing, and maintaining all the automated test setups and test cases. They must be thorough and account for critical edge cases that affect functionality. It’s best practice that your SDET be one of your app developers. In this regard, the same developer can build and test features without waiting for a separate team to step in.
- Maintain test momentum: It’s important to avoid long breaks between finishing features and writing tests. With longer breaks, your SDET will need time to familiarize themselves with the code, which adds delay to development. To further reduce this problem, the same SDET should be used for similar parts of the app, making test coverage more specialized and effective.
- Ensure adequate test coverage from your app development team: It’s not always critical to automate 100% of the tests. We find that 80% of the core functionality strikes a healthy balance between automated and manual testing, allowing human oversight for when things go wrong.
- Determine when to switch from manual to automated testing: For small projects that are rarely updated, you may want to stick with a simpler testing strategy and do everything manually. Automated tests may not be worth the upfront costs for these smaller projects until they become more complex. Therefore, a cost-benefit analysis is needed to calculate the breakeven point (if any) for automated testing of your app.
- Consider the workload between releases: As your project grows or release cycles become more frequent, QA and app development become more time-consuming. You’ll spend more time on manual QA, and eventually, you may even find it impossible to do. If you’re already there, the obvious answer is to switch to automated testing.
- Shorten the gap with AI tools: Your development team should use tools and libraries that can 1) identify gaps in test coverage and 2) simplify writing automated tests. With the help of Claude Code, you can do both fairly quickly, reducing the overall work between deployments.
The Bottom Line / TLDR
Automated testing is about building a development process that scales with your app. As your software grows and release cycles speed up, relying entirely on manual testing quickly becomes unreliable. By combining a thoughtful testing strategy, the right team structure, and modern development tools, automated tests can catch problems early and keep deployments stable. While there is an upfront investment, the long-term payoff is faster development, fewer production issues, and a more stable application overall.
Unsure whether you’re on the right track? Reach out to our team today for a free consultation. As your test integration partner, we can implement continuous testing into your CI/CD pipeline. We can also set up full CI/CD pipelines in AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions, or similar services, to handle full application testing, packaging, and deployment.
