Creation effort maps directly to costs – one can compare creation expenses with potential savings.

Creation effort is an integral characteristic comprising the following:

• Test design or re-design of manual test cases to convert from human judgment to mechanistic verification.
• Automation design and development, including creation of scripts and any reusable components.
• Swiftness and efficiency of automation development.
• Test data preparation.
• Execution, testing, and debugging of testing scripts.

Creation effort for 100 of test cases and 1,000 of test cases for the same functionality must be at the same level.

Failure criteria

• Each manual Test Case requires development (or recording) of linear test script, without reusable components for common pieces of functionality.
• Development effort for addition of new test cases depends on the number of test cases for the same functionality.