In the agile world where efficiency and effectiveness is everything, homegrown testing solutions aren’t practical. They are generally poorly controlled, inflexible and decrease productivity. You need your company to run smoothly and homegrown testing solutions are not up to the task at hand.
While you’re homegrown testing solution has been working “fine for now,” who wants to be just fine? And, moreover, how can you trust that the system will continue to work just fine down the road?
Here are just a few more points to consider about homegrown testing solutions.
Cost
In-house solutions are far from affordable. They cost more on money and can eat up an already small budget. You may think that switching to an automated testing platform from a third party has a high associated cost, but how much do you think is spent simply maintaining an in-house testing solution? Testing engineers cost a pretty penny to keep on and by having them focused on a homegrown testing solution versus your products makes no sense. There’s a reason the global anything-as-a-service market (XaaS) is expected to grow at a CAGR of 38.22 percent from 2016-2020. In-house solutions are without a doubt costlier than third-party automated testing platform vendors.
Maintenance
After implementation of a homegrown testing solution, it should come as no surprise that the work is far from over – it’s just begun, actually. The time it takes to maintain a testing solution is high, so why would you keep your already expensive testing engineers from focusing on finding bugs and improving products for your loyal end users? Other questions you should ask yourself and consider are: Who will have the responsibility of maintaining the in-house testing solution? Will they truly understand the solution inside and out? How quickly will issues be resolved and do they have the ability to solve the issues at hand?
Flexibility
As your company continues to evolve, which is basically mandatory in today’s world, your needs will change. Can you safely say that your homegrown testing solution will provide the functionality needed for these new developments? Instead, why not buy an automated testing platform from a third-party vendor that already has a wide range of functionality built in? Additionally, what happens if the person who originally coded your homegrown testing solution leaves the company? Let’s just say you better hope you have someone on board who understands the original code in order to make the necessary fixes and/or improvements. Though it probably seems that you have more control and flexibility with a homegrown testing solution, you may actually be signing yourself up for a substandard solution.
Conclusion
To help maximize efficiency and your company’s fullest potential, an automated testing platform is the answer. Sustaining competitive advantage is challenging when dealing with our constantly changing technological world. Instead of turning your homegrown testing solution into another project for your testing engineers to manage, your company should focus on innovation. By outsourcing your testing to an automated testing platform, your team can focus on what are most important – moving software development projects forward.
