That depends who you ask. Here are three different perspectives…
The World Quality Report (by Capgemini, Micro Focus, and Sogeti) is based on a sample of 1,600 interviews from enterprises with 1,000+ employees (25%), 5,000+ employees (3%), and 10,000+ employees (41%). They report:
“It is worrying that our survey results show automation is currently under-exploited in QA and testing. While we see a rise in the number of organizations benefitting from automation, the value they generate is largely unchanged and the level of test automation is still low (below 20%).”
The Sauce Labs Testing trends report surveyed a different demographic: 732 professionals responsible for testing web and mobile applications — 67% of which deploy hourly (10%), daily (34%), or weekly (23%). This sample yielded higher test automation rates:
“In this year’s survey, 42% cited their testing efforts as “mostly” or “entirely” manual, many more than the 32% that said they were “mostly” or “entirely” automated. While there remains room for improvement, there is good news that progress is being made in this area. The number of development teams whose testing is “mostly” or “entirely” automated is up to almost 1 in 3 (32%), from only 1 in 4 (26%) last year.”
QASymphony and Techwell found that the rate of test automation is 29% at mid-size companies and 17% at the enterprise level. They offer a detailed breakdown of the types of tests being automated:
“Regression tests are by far the most frequently automated test type (86%), followed by repeated execution (46%), load (29%), performance (29%), and cross-browser (29%) testing. Most testing (63%) is still being done solely by QA, but we are seeing a rise in collaborative testing teams that include both QA and developers (27%).”
At Tricentis, our experience reviewing actual client test portfolios has found an average test automation rate of 11% (based primarily on large enterprises).
