Quality assurance testing as a separate step in the software development cycle is the key to success for the final product. Yet, many small companies decide not to onboard dedicated QA members justifying their decision by saying it is an unnecessary expense.
It’s true that implementing software testing into the project requires additional budgeting for employee salaries, auxiliary testing tools, and automation–hat is why it may sound strange that these extra expenses can save costs–however, analyzing the way pre-release testing helps to avoid potential issues, the benefits become obvious.
Let’s have a closer look at how software testing can save you money.
Operational Expenses Savings
The employment of dedicated QA specialists helps to save the efforts for developers, as they will be able to focus on writing the code rather than looking for bugs. Apart from the difference in approach towards testing, as sometimes QAs may find some really unexpected use-case flaws, usually, the salaries of manual QA testers are lower than the development costs. Thus, by distributing the responsibilities, you can achieve better results.
If QA specialists frequently perform the same tasks, they may develop tunnel vision and miss some bugs. Automation scripts may take two hours to be set up, but if you get your costs covered here, an automated web test can be run many times without deterioration of quality. The savings here are pretty substantial especially for routine cases that are done before any release.
Delivery Time Savings
By saving operational time, software testing also speeds up the delivery time. And all PMs know that the longer the delay from finishing the product to releasing it, the more money you lose. Moreover, you don’t receive additional revenue from the initiative and still pay for the time required for post-fixes that could have been avoided. Incorporating the QA tasks in the development sprints allow you to spot bugs earlier and fix them on the go.
Saved Investments for Reputation Recovery
It’s difficult to earn the reputation of a trusted software vendor or a service provider and build a good relationship with your customer. The even more unfortunate fact is that all that hard work can be ruined by a single nasty bug that spoils user-experience. If there is no proper software testing before the release, and all use-case scenarios are not verified, it’s possible that potential customers will face issues during the purchase stage, or experience some issues when using your website or application. This may lead to an increase of negative feedback in social media, and review websites, cause a load on your customer support, and cause a decrease in retention rates. Even the most loyal clients will be switching to a competitive company that offers a better experience. It will take much more money and time to earn their trust back than dedicating some of these resources to testing, and making sure that there are no flaws.
Thus, the investments into the software testing on the project are completely justified by the benefits it brings and positive impact on other aspects. So if you are still delegating testing tasks to the dev team, it’s high time to consider changing the approach and start developing a software testing culture!
short url:
