Automation ROI
Automation ROI measures the return on investment from test automation — comparing the upfront and ongoing cost of building and maintaining automated tests against the time saved versus manual execution over the automation's lifetime. It answers whether automating a given area was actually worth it.
A rough calculation compares the cost to build and maintain an automated test against the manual execution time it saves, multiplied by how many times it'll run — a test executed once a year rarely justifies automation investment, while one run on every single commit almost always does, regardless of how expensive it was to build.
The honest version of this calculation also needs to include maintenance cost, which is easy to underestimate — a flaky, frequently-breaking automated test can cost more engineering time to keep working than it would have taken to just run the equivalent check manually each time.
