Turn Testing into a Productivity Powerhouse (like Steve!)

In the first part of this post, we discussed how Steve shares three testing lessons with his executive team to help them understand the complexities of software testing. He uses the Marick Testing Matrix to build a testing strategy. He presented it to the executive team. Didn't catch that article? It's here: Ready to Teach Your Exec Team about Product Quality? Follow Steve! 

But while Steve presents the new testing strategy to his peers in the executive team, their faces start changing and growing more pensive. The realization that achieving high quality will require a significant investment is becoming evident to all.

As you recall, Steve’s CEO asked three critical questions:

• How much will this cost?
• Will these changes slow down the development process?
• Can you guarantee that this investment will avoid the experience we just had this year?

Steve’s answers aren’t encouraging. Why? Because status quo options aren’t encouraging. Let’s dig deeper. 

Status Quo Answers

How much will it cost?

At Ultimate Software, our annual testing budget was millions of dollars. I am not talking about one or two million; the QA team payroll was more than six million dollars. You can reduce that number using outsourcing, but there is a cost on the quality side. We did everything possible to deliver the highest quality possible. It costs many millions of dollars. You will need specialists, you need continuous training, and you need to invest in expensive software testing tools.

Will these changes slow down the development process?

Yes, it will. In the long run, the investment will allow you to accelerate and deliver more, but that improvement will come after more than a year, maybe longer, and you will need to monitor and adjust to ensure you keep all of those gains. You have to be vigilant.

Can you guarantee that this investment will avoid the experience we just had this year?

No, you cannot. There is no perfect software. Like the example provided about the 911 system, one defect can bring your system down. In other words, you must invest enough to create a parallel development team focused on testing, and you will still have issues.

Can Testaify help change these answers? Yes! If Steve has Testaify , he can answer these questions very differently.

Answering with Testaify

How much will it cost?

Steve can say: “Nothing because we will save money! We have only three applications in our portfolio today. We can achieve a continuous comprehensive testing strategy using an AI software testing platform called Testaify for less than $250,000 annually. We expect to right-size our test automation team as Testaify handles our automated regression suite. We can reduce our QA budget, which will more than cover Testaify’s cost.”

Executives will look at him perplexed. They will not believe him. “What? Are you sure?” they will say. Steve will tell them, “We are running the proof of concept already, and the results are impressive. It performs functional, performance, usability, accessibility, and security testing. It also consumes our requirements information and tests against them. It knows all the testing methodologies.” 

Will these changes slow down the development process?

Steve will answer: “No, on the contrary, we expect our development process will accelerate. The Testaify cloud platform will run tests anytime and notify our developers of the findings. It integrates with our CI/CD pipeline. The information is available to the whole team, which reduces coordination costs. Our test team will refocus on helping with BDD and shifting left. That will allow us to build quality in the design. Plus, they will have more time for exploratory testing.”

Can you guarantee that this investment will avoid the experience we just had this year?

Steve will be able to say: “While there is no perfect software, and in the end, releasing is a human judgment call, the Testaify platform will provide us feedback and insights about each build tested. Testaify will tell us if we should stop a specific release before going into production. Because it is handling most of our testing, it has a comprehensive view of the quality of our product. There is no need to get data from multiple sources anymore. Thanks to AI, it gets better at testing our product the more we use it. It is a cloud platform that can run 24/7. As such, it generates more tests in a few hours than our whole team can develop in an entire year.”

Can you imagine sharing Steve’s answers with your leadership team because you’ve experienced the paradigm shift Testaify will deliver? Wouldn’t that be awesome? I think so. 

If you want to join the future of testing, it is time to join Testaify’s waitlist. Very soon, Testaify will be available, with other products to follow until we reach our goal of enabling Continuous Comprehensive Testing.