After more than a year of navigating the sudden impacts of COVID-19 on employees around the world, we’re beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Vaccination rates are up—with over 50% of American adults having received at least one dose—daily virus case totals have dramatically declined, and many organizations are putting large-scale return-to-work plans in motion.

I recently had the opportunity to attend and present at NRF’s Retail Converge Event. After a year of disruption, changing operations, and a new normaI for consumer behavior, several important topics came to the forefront for leading retailers. Here are my top five takeaways from the event: There is a heightened push to modernize supply chains.

Having a coded approach to test automation has its benefits. It certainly does give you the power to be extra flexible in terms of test case creation. But with it, it also requires a lot of investments from you – in terms of time and resources. Hence, you need to decide if that is really the power you need because, in the end, you need automation that gives you returns on your investment(ROI).

“If you have bad tests, automation can help you do bad testing faster.”— James Marcus Bach How do we ensure that the test automation is working as a saviour and not adding to the testing woes? One wrong step in this direction and be assured to lose precious time and energy. Additionally, wrong automation will make the quality of the software suffer badly. Organizations are spending on automation for better software quality and a good ROI(Return on Investment) with time.

Almost all software and web-based companies (SaaS, e-commerce, and more) that care about a bug-free user experience will eventually need a systematic and repeatable process to test their products. And for most software teams, the only way to feasibly accomplish testing fast enough that it doesn’t become a bottleneck in the software development lifecycle is to incorporate automation tools.

As far as web test automation goes, Selenium is certainly the most popular toolset. That popularity is uncontested. A survey on test automation finding that 54% of the respondents were using Selenium might be surprising only in that the number is so low. Many of the alternatives to Selenium, Software-as-a-Service products that record and re-run entirely in the browser, still use the Selenium as the core driving technology.

It’s no secret that there has been massive disruption across global supply chains over the past year. In fact, 94% of Fortune 1000 companies have stated that they are facing supply chain disruptions from COVID-19. Many factors have conspired to drive disruption, leading to increased costs and delays for many industries and ultimately impacting the prices that companies and consumers pay for goods.

With the advent of agile and DevOps culture, we’re already embracing digital transformation. Organizations globally are looking for newer technologies and tools to innovate, enhance productivity and deliver faster. If we talk about testing itself — automation has taken us several leaps ahead; QA teams have solidified test efficiency and coverage even further. Gone are the days when automation testers had to learn coding to write test scripts.