Top 20 Test Automation Statistics QA Teams Must Know in 2024

Delivering a product on time without compromising its quality is what every manager and QA specialist wants. To ensure product quality, testing is a necessity. Test automation can provide faster and more efficient tests than manual testing. Automating testing also offers benefits such as increased test coverage and accuracy.

Despite its benefits, many firms still do not use test automation tools. To increase investments in test automation tools, we present top statistics that show its benefits, trending practices, and rate of adoption by your competitors. 

Automation testing vs. manual testing

It has been demonstrated that performing repetitive manual testing on large software systems or those with comprehensive dataset coverage is challenging. 

Below, you can see statistics supporting organizations’ goals of moving from manual testing to automation testing.

1. Manual testing is the most time-consuming activity in the testing cycle ( see Figure 1). 

Figure 1. The most time-consuming activities within a test cycle

Source: perfect.io

2. Test Automation has replaced 50% or more of the manual testing efforts in 46% of the cases(See Figure 2). 

Figure 2. Effect of automated testing on effort reduction

source: PractiTest

Sponsored

Testifi is a provider of test automation solutions. Testifi offers CAST, a low-code test automation tool that aims to support businesses in providing high-quality software via a test-first strategy. Automated testing is the top priority in the software testing space (See Figure 3).

Figure 3. Top priorities in the software testing space

Source: perfect.io

Automated tests adoption 

In 2022 these percentages of testers claimed to use automated testing or scripting for:

4. Functional and regression testing: 73%
5. Unit testing: 45%
6. CI/CD: 44%
7. Load and stress testing: 31%

In 2022,

8. 55% of companies claimed to pursue automated testing strategies cite quality improvement, and ~30% cite time to market as their primary driver 
9. ~42% of companies indicated that test automation is a key part of QA (Figure 4) 

Figure 4. Current test automation maturity

Source: Kobiton

10. Most companies using test automation allocate 10% to 49% of the QA budget to test automation (See Figure 5).

Figure 5. Test automation budget allocation

Source: Kobiton

11. 26% of companies surveyed indicate finding the right tools for test automation as the biggest challenge they face. 

To understand more about automation testing tools, read Automation Testing Tools: Code-based, Robotics & AI tools.

12. ~33% of companies seek to automate between 50% to 75% of their testing process, while ~20% aim to automate more than 75% of the testing process. 
13. ~24% of companies have achieved more than 50% of test automation in their testing process.
14. ~24% of companies adopting test automation indicate stability as a surprise they have encountered. 

Test development models/frameworks 

15. In 2022 test-driven development as a development framework was used 18% of the time. 
16. In 2022 DevOps as a development model was used 38% of the time.
17. API testing is an essential skill that the tester should be familiar with. In a survey, 97% of responders indicated that API testing is crucial for their operational success. 
18.  In a survey, 99% of responders indicated that functional test automation and test scripting are crucial for them. 

Market size & growth

19. The global test market exceeded $40 billion in 2020. 
20. The global test market is expected to grow between 7% to 12% CAGR between 2021 and 2025.