Software testing: why is it so important?

Software testing is the new trend nowadays both for programmers, both for business.

We also dedicated many articles to this topic: reviewed automated and unittesting, their pros and cons, and discussed whether your startup needs software testing.

However, despite this popularity, many people still treat software testing as a huge waste of time and unnecessary “add-on” to the software development process.

The main incentive in asking the developer team to cancel or reduce their testing time are cost and time savings. Nevertheless, this approach surely has a reverse effect. In this article, we want to prove that software testing is the way to significant savings and is extremely useful for business.

Software testing is the process of researching software to identify errors and determine the correspondence between the actual and expected behavior of software, carried out on the basis of a set of tests selected in a certain way. In a broader sense, software testing is a software quality control technique, which includes test design, test execution and analysis of the results obtained.

Testing criteria are usually the following:

• functionality;
• ease of development;
• ease of installation;
• the quality of documentation and support;
• performance;
• etc

The main purpose is to show that the product is ready for release on the market, that all the functions declared by the developer work stably. Testing is required by the developer himself to make sure the product is ready and customers to see what they have paid for.

Testing vs good developer?

There is hardly to find any developer who writes code perfectly. This is not a stone in the developers’ garden, but just a fact. People are inclined to make mistakes, human error can lead to a violation of the normal operation of software at all stages of software development. A person cannot keep everything in memory, so corrections are a normal matter. Moreover, even the most qualified developer may not see bugs, as he/she has been looking at this code for quite a long time.

Take, for example, the world’s largest technology companies: Google, Facebook, Rockstar, Sony, etc. They hire the most intelligent developers from around the world. However, even such cool programmers can write unsafe code.

Therefore, we answer all those who think their code is flawless: How do you know that your code works perfectly? Have you tested it? Can you check it now and say that it works really fine?

According to Software Fail Watch, a global software trick analysis from Tricentis, in 2017, companies lost $ 1.7 trillion due to software malfunctions.

High-quality software testing can significantly reduce the number of substantiated claims to software quality at the implementation stage, reduce the resources involved in the refinement, correction and maintenance of the system. As a result, software maintenance costs are reduced by 15–20% and the reputation of the system developer is growing.

And, on the contrary, if competent testing of software is not carried out, then the cost of maintenance may increase to 80–85% of the total cost of development and implementation, and the potential number of customers will decrease.

Safe business

Hackers and other intruders can use some bugs. Quality assurance can lead to substantial direct costs of money for you or your customers if your software is dealing with payments. Moreover, you should always be aware of the possibility of disclosure of confidential data or stealing of client bases.

Saving money

It is always harder to correct a mistake than to prevent it. Furthermore, it is much more expensive. If they are not detected on time, it will be much harder to fix them. Mainly because it already create a new chain of impact, and they can easily affect another functionality or hide a lot of different defects.

Developers need a lot of time to recognize the cause of the problem and to make all the necessary modifications to the code. We all know that time means the money in software development, so it is better to prevent those problems from the beginning.

That is why the iterative approach of Agile model perfectly fits in the well-known concept of testers “test as soon as possible and even more often.” Indeed, every important episode of software development ideally should end with testing.

Protection of reputation

Released product with a lot of bugs will surely do not satisfied the users working with it. You should always remember that the first impression is really hard to change.

So then in the future, it can be very challenging to prove that the problem has been solved and they can use it again. The first impression is really hard to change.

Besides, announcements of software problems immediately lead to a fall in the value of the asset of firms.

Control Process

Software testing can be seen as one of the methods of the control technique. The process of the software development should always be monitored and you should measure whether it goes against the established requirements or not.

All project participants are interested in effective testing. It allows you to save development costs and bug fix, level project risks, improve product quality, save developers from unnecessary tasks … In general, if the project has the right testing, then the total number of defects found is usually only lower!

It does not matter what the product seems like, because at the heart of its quality lies the ton of work done. In most cases, software testing engineers give people the opportunity to enjoy the product by checking that everything works well. Never neglect this stage of the software development cycle. Save you a lot of money and nerves :)

What about your experience with software testing? We would appreciate your thoughts in the comments below! And if you liked the article — please share it with your friends and colleagues.

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