A growing question facing software teams around the world has recently emerged, prompting them to ask “What is hyperautomation? What do I need to do to prepare for it?” For any software team leader wondering, “What is hyperautomation?” it is of utmost importance to understand how to prepare for this emerging trend in the software world.
While software hyperautomation is not a new idea, its prevalence is quickly approaching over the horizon. Gartner has started listing hyperautomation as a “top strategic technology trend” in recent years, and predicts that 55% of enterprise architecture programs will be supported by AI-enabled software by 2022. Many experts believe that teams that are able to successfully implement software hyperautomation early on will be better able to adapt to the related changes that are poised to rock the software world.
Given how important hyperautomation is becoming for software teams, our team decided to share what we’ve learned about hyperautomation as experts in this space to help you get your team up to speed.
First, what is software hyperautomation and how does it work?
Hyperautomation is essentially automating everything that can possibly be automated within your organization.
Hyperautomation is valuable for nearly any team, but especially valuable to software teams and teams whose success hinges upon efficiency gains like lean startups that need to accelerate time to market and enterprise organizations that have inefficient legacy processes that can bury them with burdensome costs.
In the context of software and technology, hyperautomation is typically driven by implementing a range of automation solutions like AI, machine learning, automation tools and packaged software to automate as much of the work that has been done by humans as possible.
What makes hyperautomation different from traditional automation?
As we all know, the concept of automation has been around for a long time in the technology space, and even within just the software space.
Holistically, hyperautomation in the technology space can be broken down into a handful of key areas:
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
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Business Process Management (BPM)
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Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
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Advanced Analytics
While past discussions in the technology space focused more on robotic process automation, the emergence of software as a ubiquitous technology in our daily lives has led to growing emphasis on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced analytics in recent years.
As these discussions in the software space have been brewing, the industry has seen a surging interest in accelerating the gains for automation not just within one team or area of an organization, but literally everywhere within the organization as much as possible. There is a growing sense of urgency around the idea that teams that successfully implement and practice hyperautomation will be in a much stronger position compared to competitors, particularly as Gartner and similar firms have been escalating the issue and raising the flag that teams need to address hyperautomation as soon as possible.
Why does it matter? What are the major benefits of hyperautomation?
Gartner expects the hyperautomation-enabling software market to grow close to $600 billion by 2022, and the related impacts will be profound.
The improvements brought about through hyperautomation can augment team members at virtually any organization, enabling them to be more effective in solving important problems and allowing them to focus on more valuable work more of the time.
With hyperautomation making redundant, time-consuming tasks streamlined, team members can be less task-driven or focused on completing a set of steps, and more focused on delivering value to the organization and the customers it serves.
In the software space, this means creating and delivering better software to the market in a shorter amount of time, with more time spent on creating value in the software product and less time spent on things like writing and maintaining software tests.
Hyperautomation can also help facilitate integrations across platforms, allowing team members to spend less time setting up and maintaining connections between systems and working on data transfers and flows, with automated systems managing these processes automatically.
By introducing automation throughout an organization, hyperautomation can also thereby enhance the scalability of the organization as much as possible, and even facilitate speeding up the scaling process as the team grows.
Finally, for teams concerned with ROI, EBITDA, and cost reduction, automation can play a significant role in reducing costs and maximizing ROI, identifying areas that can be optimized from a cost perspective and also being a part of the solution in reducing cost.
Some examples of how hyperautomation can benefit software teams includes:
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Automating software test writing and updates based on user behavior
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Using analytics to automatically understand which employees are engaged or disengaged
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Improving the hiring process with AI-facilitated applicant screening to automatically refine candidate lists
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Using artificial intelligence to automatically know how to best help people with customer support and help desk automation scenarios
How will hyperautomation effect software testing and QA?
In terms of software testing and QA, automation has been traditionally limited to the test execution phase and monitoring systems. However, these processes still require a significant level of human work to set up, watch and maintain over time.
Hyperautomation in software testing and QA aims to reduce that level of human involvement in the process, by achieving efficiencies through strategies like automating the test writing process, adapting tests automatically based on studying actual user behavior and interactions with the software, and making tests more effective on their own without human intervention.
With hyperautomation, the goal for software teams is to go beyond just automating repetitive tasks and go a step further to even automate decision-making processes with advanced hyperautomation technologies and practices.
Additional common strategies for hyperautomation in software testing and QA include making automation technology-agnostic at a detailed level and increasing the frequency of automation to gather more data and improve faster.
How can my team get started and prepare for hyperautomation?
Since the concept of hyperautomation is still more theoretical than put in practice for most teams, it may feel like a daunting task to get started. However, there are a number of resources and experts to turn to that can help you get up to speed quickly, and the return on investment is easily justified when seeing the efficiency gains that can be realized through hyperautomation and how it can help achieve team goals faster.
If you’re wanting to get started with hyperautomation, our team at testRigor can help. As one of the most cutting-edge teams around solving hyperautomation for organizations every day, we’re fully focused on making the hyperautomation process as effective as possible for the teams that we help. In addition, we make hyperautomation easy to understand, and easy to implement with help from our team every step of the way.
With our state-of-the-art hyperautomation technology and strategies, we’ll help your team solve your automation challenges across users, devices, technologies, and environments, so that your team can realize the efficiencies and scalability that are critical to your success as an organization with better test coverage, more effective tests, higher reusability, and long-term cost savings that can help reduce your time to market.
If you’re ready to see how testRigor can help your team succeed with hyperautomation, get in touch with us today and one of our friendly experts will help guide you through the process.