Why Software Testing Should Be Considered a 'Profit Center'

Software testing is often viewed as a “cost center” and as such organizations look to minimize cost as much as possible. A common strategy is to spend as little as possible to achieve the optimal level of quality software.

Yes, it's true that testing and quality assurance (QA) do come at a cost as organizations need to dedicate testers to check the quality of the software they're continually shipping. However, just looking at software testing as a cost center won't allow you to see that software testing and quality assurance can actually enable you to manage costs and increase revenue in the long term.

That's due in part to the fact that effective software testing and quality assurance allow you to build and ship dependable software. 

The Economics of Software Testing

Although software testing requires an investment, the QA testing approach you choose will positively affect your company's revenue in a variety of ways, including:

Increases Customer Satisfaction

The ultimate goal for many organizations is to get their software to as many users as possible as quickly as possible — not really a sustainable business model because speed often leads to errors and a poor user experience.

And shipping buggy software or software that provides a poor user experience will likely cause customers to seek out your competitors' products.

A better way to determine if your software (and your business) can meet customer needs and retain more business is by gauging their satisfaction. Software that's well-executed and provides a top-notch user experience encourages users to stay with your business and become repeat customers.

And as you gain more repeat customers, you'll end up spending less on customer acquisition. The best thing to help you satisfy the needs of your customers is by releasing bug-free software.

Consequently, it's easy to draw a line directly from quality assurance and software checks to your top line. Ultimately, software testing becomes a profit center that pays off dramatically.

To better serve your customers, you need to invest substantial resources to develop advanced quality assurance and software testing. Doing so will boost your customer satisfaction rate and help your business thrive. 

Speeds Up Innovation

To remain competitive in today's digital world, enterprises must innovate continuously as the organizations that can roll out error-free software the fastest will win the market. Constant innovation as well as a strong user experience will churn out loyal customers, boost revenue, and enable you to attract new customers.

Boosts Productivity

Making QA and software checking part of your development process, increases your productivity. 

Of course, it takes less time to push out software quickly than thoroughly test it before shipping; however, whatever time you save is eaten up by the many hours it will take your team to fix those errors. And this problem is exacerbated because it takes much longer to fix bugs in the production stage than the design stage.

When you include software tests and quality checks as part of your workflow, your team will save more time, increasing productivity and saving money.

Avoids Expensive Rework

It's important that testers test the product during the entire development cycle because the later in the process that they find a defect, the more it will cost to fix. Even if developers have to make major changes early in the project, there won't be major changes to the budget. In fact, it costs much less to make changes to the application at the early stages of the development lifecycle than at the final stages.

Averts Disasters

Limiting testing to get products to market faster presents significant risk to companies as the software might perform badly, break, compromise security — or maybe even cost lives.

For example, in June 2021, Orange, France’s biggest telecom operator, experienced a catastrophic software failure that affected emergency services in Paris for several hours, possibly causing the deaths of three or four people.

"Orange's internal investigators found that the emergency calls, which rely on a platform of servers responsible for dispatching calls, were severely disturbed because of a bug in the call server software," according to Reuters.

Testing the software early and often would have improved the chances that Orange would have identified the bug and avoided tragedy.

Increases Brand Awareness and Reputation

Today more than ever, an organization's online presence is synonymous with its brand. So shipping buggy software negatively affects your short-term revenue, not to mention it could potentially cause a devastating loss of trust in your brand. Going to market with error-free software, on the other hand, will increase awareness in your brand and enhance your reputation.

SLAs and QA Testing 

Software testing can also support or sabotage your service-level agreements (SLAs). If specific conditions regarding the quality of your software aren't met, you'll likely be hit with penalties. Software testing throughout the development cycle ensures that you're meeting the requirements of your SLAs, which directly affects your revenue.

How Functionize Helps Organizations Use Software Testing as a Profit Center

Functionize can help you use software testing as a profit center in a number of ways, including enabling you to:

Gain a Competitive Advantage

Today, the software market is more competitive than ever and as such you need every edge you can get. Functionize's automated testing allows you to develop error-free software as well as boost software QA productivity. Functionize uses machine learning to increase software testing productivity by giving you the right tool to automate your software QA testing. 

Although you're under constant pressure to release new products, buggy applications can negatively affect your revenue and cause customers to seek out your competitors. Automated testing, however, speeds up your regression testing significantly, which in turn slashes the time it takes to get your error-free products to market. At the end of the day, the faster you get your products out, the more competitive you'll be.

Find Bugs Before They Impact Customers

Buggy software is also a nightmare for your reputation. Functionize lets you find issues before they affect your customers, minimizing potential revenue loss. 

Bugs are often trickier to identify with test automation because automated tests frequently break and lead to false positives, i.e., tests that fail incorrectly. Functionize, however, helps you find and fix bugs faster. And test results are easy to understand with step-by-step screenshots and troubleshooting logs.

Test business critical applications

Business critical apps, such as Salesforce and Workday, are used by revenue-generating teams, including sales and marketing. Not being able to use any of these applications, even for a few hours, could lead to devastating loss of productivity and impact to your revenue. 

With Functionize, you can be assured that your apps are compatible with every new release of your third-party business-critical apps.

Conclusion

Innovation and speed in software development are critical to the successes of today's organizations. However, they are often at odds because innovation plus speed typically equals risk.

The key is to maximize the user experience of your customers, while minimizing the risk of errors in the development process. 

The bottom line: Functionize makes software testing intelligent with AI, and integrates it into the application development process, enabling you to streamline your software development and elevate testing to a strategic role.

To learn more about how to turn QA testing from a cost center into a profit center, visit the Functionize website, view a demo, or contact Functionize.