All testing professionals know that it is impossible and unnecessary to automate everything. However, test reporting is better to automate. It is unlikely that such an activity brings someone great pleasure. In addition, manual reporting is a time-consuming, tedious process that requires high attention to detail. Fortunately, this can be automated. In this article, Zebrunner team will explain what such automation provides.

Reporting vs. Automated reporting in QA

Reporting in software testing includes the gathering of data from various sources and organizing and presenting information in an understandable way. Reporting must meet strict criteria, otherwise, the data presented will be irrelevant and distort the situation. Reporting allows you to find out what is happening on the project: whether it is progressing according to plan or lagging, and whether there are risk areas. This is needed not only for the testing team and the project manager but also for all project stakeholders. 

Automated reporting is a report that is generated automatically based on the results of autotests. The automated reporting tool connects to the automation framework, collects test results, analyzes them, and allows you to track progress through dashboards and widgets. You can monitor any metrics you need, from coverage, test duration, and the number of failures to the productivity of individual team members. Automated reporting is essential for test automation workflow. When you have many test-runs you need a lot of time to structure the information about them and track all your project’s metrics. Automated reporting software does it in a matter of seconds. 

Let’s see in detail why it’s important for you to automate your test reporting process. 

Visualization & representation

When building a report, a specialist often faces the question of which format to choose and how to present information in a clear way. With the automated reporting tool, you get generated colorful reports that give you a complete picture of the state of your QA.

Zebrunner automation reporting provides customizable dashboards with widget templates. It gives transparency to your QA workflow. QA team members as well as project stakeholders get statistics about test execution, pass rate tendencies, and test summary in a few clicks. 

Let’s see how it works: 

1. Go to the dashboard and create a new widget. 
2. Explore all the trends available and choose the ones you need. 
3. Select the needed period. 
4. Choose the filters from the list including, for instance, a platform, browser, milestone, priority, defect, etc.
5. Get an idea of your testing trends.

Time-saving

The main advantage of automated reporting is that it saves your time significantly. Hours that used to be spent collecting information from various sources are freed up. You can devote this time to new automation script writing and more complex types of testing conducting.

The test reporting tool collects and organizes all test information. The QA engineer just selects the necessary widgets and sets up filters to get relevant information. Use a test automation reporting tool together with a professional test automation management platform to boost your testing process. Plan, execute, and execute manual and automated activities in one place. Run 1000+ threads in parallel to reduce manifold testing time.

Data analysis

An automation reporting solution both collects data from various sources and provides instant analyses.  You get information with general trends about tests that passed and failed. The analyses feature enables a comparison of the previous execution results with the current ones. Therefore, the built-in AI/ML technology gives information on the most likely causes of failures. You can train the algorithm to improve the accuracy of the analysis. Thus, you save time that would otherwise be spent manually searching for the root causes of failures.

Team communication & productivity

Reporting on the QA is necessary for the synchronous work of the team. Automated reporting is a single source of reliable information for all. This helps to keep everyone up to date on how testing and development are progressing, what are the risks, and what is the effectiveness of the team.

Also, automated reporting positively impacts team productivity in several ways.

First, at the expense of time. Testers can devote the freed-up time to exploring the product, searching for non-obvious bugs, and doing UI/UX testing on real devices.

Second, you can track the performance of each team member by setting up the corresponding widgets. This way you can understand who finds critical bugs the most, whose tests fail the most, and why.

Third, thanks to the transparency provided by automated reporting, all team members work together. This has a positive effect on overall productivity.

Bug reduction

Automation reporting solution helps to reduce bugs simplifying the bug-fixing process. You identify trends in failed tests and access to root causes of errors. With them, you can fix crucial bugs at an early development stage. With each new iteration, there will be fewer and fewer bugs, because the root causes have been eliminated.

Furthermore, automated reporting software integrates with Jira, you only need to link the failure with a bug to a corresponding issue. Some automation reporting tools provide the possibility to create a new Jira issue directly. You choose the project you need, select the issue type, and fill in the required fields.

In addition, automation reporting gives you test artifacts. It simplifies bug fixing because you have full information about the failure including logs, videos, and screenshots.

Routine task elimination

Any report takes a lot of effort and time. This is tedious work, the value of which can be reduced to zero if a human makes a little mistake. Automated reporting is insurance against human errors and the release of team members from monotonous work. High-quality software will cope with such a task much faster and more efficiently.