Maintain
Repair time per case
How long it takes to fix one test the product broke and get it passing again for the right reason.
- Unit
- minutes per case
- Where you enter it
- Maintain tab, per vendor.
What it means
The person-time to diagnose why a case broke, change it, and confirm it passes again — after triage has already established that the test, not the product, is at fault. Multiplied by the cases to repair, it is the largest term in maintenance effort.
It is per vendor: codeless tools with object repositories make a rename a one-place fix; a hand-written framework may need the change in many files.
Why it matters to the cost
Repair time and breakage rate multiply, so a tool that halves both quarters the repair cost. Forty-five minutes a repair on 90 repairs a year is 68 hours; ten minutes on 30 repairs is five. That gap, every year, is most of what a self-healing licence buys.
Typical values
AI-native tools around 10 minutes; script-based tools around 45 minutes; homegrown frameworks around 90 minutes; editing a manual case about 15 minutes.
Typical values describe a category of tool — AI-native, codeless, script-based, homegrown, manual — never a named product. Why we do not price named products.
Where it appears in the model
Maintain — continuously
- cases to repair
- Total test cases × Test breakage rate
- cases healed
- Total test cases × Self-healed cases per year
- Maintenance effort per year
- cases to repair × Repair time per case + cases healed × Review one heal + Platform upkeep per year + New cases added per year × Build a new case
Every name is a link to its definition. See the whole model.
Try it with your numbers
Repair time per case is a row in the calculator. Change it and every total on the page moves with it — free, in your browser, nothing to install.
See how repair time per case impacts the calculation of test automation costsLast reviewed 2026-09-15. All terms.