Why Automation Testing is Important

Everyone  knows  how  important  testing is, and,  with luck, everyone actually does test the software that they release. But do they really?Can  they?  Even  a  simple program often  has many different possiblebehaviors,  some of which only take  place in rather unusual (and hard

to  duplicate)  circumstances.  Even  if  every possible  behavior was tested  when  the program was first released  to the users, what about the  second release, or even a "minor" modification? The feature being modified  will probably be re-tested,  but what about other, seemingly

unrelated,  features  that  may have been  inadvertently broken by the modification?  Will  every unusual test case  from the first release's testing  be  remembered,  much  less  retried,  for  the  new release, especially  if  retrying  the test would require  a lot of preliminary work (e.g. adding appropriate test records to the database)?

This  problem  arose for us several years  ago, when we found that our software  was  getting  so complicated that  testing everything before release  was  a  real  chore, and a good many  bugs (some of them very obvious)  were getting out into the field. What's more, I found that I

was  actually  afraid  to add new features,  concerned that they might break  the rest of the software. It  was this last problem that really drove  home to me the importance of  making it possible to quickly and easily test all the features of all our products.