by William Wright
Money appropriated and approved early in 2020 will be made available for various testing projects in 2020. I think we can all agree that testing is important, but there tends to be a hesitation for companies to collaborate and review the scope of projects, resulting in unnecessary delays or postponements.
The question is, why are companies reluctant to invest in testing and what can be done to accelerate the testing process before other application priorities?
The value of testing
The biggest issue with testing is that the result of implementing testing practices is somewhat invisible. Test automation can be in place and manual tests scripts run, but management and end-users will not see any of this, they will simply experience the outcome – a bug free, high-quality performance. The problem is no-one seems to be concerned how developers of mission critical applications deliver this seamless UX. In contrast, when companies invest in software development, they can often see results very quickly. Software is put out to production, data starts to build up and new revenues might be reflected.
Herein lies the issue. People like to see the ‘fruits of their spend’ and can forget that it is often what goes unseen that makes the biggest impact. Consider this, rarely will a business, or even household, in this day and age function without WiFi. Now we don’t see the WiFi, or even feel it, but we sure as hell see and feel the impact when it malfunctions. It’s the same with testing. We don’t always see the tests being run, and we certainly don’t feel them, but we notice when a bug hits the system and, more importantly, the end-user does!
This is why the biggest mistake I’m seeing recently is that testing is not a priority and it should be. Key decision makers are trusting that the application development is adequate ‘for the time being’ and the application can run on its own lifecycle. The thing is, no application is ‘golden’. It is therefore a key business management decision whether to be reactive; ignore application risk now and deal with any resulting issues later or be proactive; eliminate possible code or performance issues through automated testing tools now.
Don’t wait until it is too late. Speak to us today about how we can help ease the burden of testing, change the ‘wait and see’ mentality and break the cycle of postponements.
