Newsletters
6 Critical Reasons Why You Can't Afford To Delay Automating Your Software Testing
Critical Reason Number 2… Reduce The Time To Market
Even if you monopolize your marketplace like Microsoft, a potential tactic to stay ahead or even catch up to your competitors is to continually work on reducing time to market. Position your company to bring new features to the market faster and faster, leaving your competition in the dust. But how can Quality Assurance impact Time to Market? This issue will talk about a simple tactic, you can implement quickly to reduce your time to market and save you money.
Under the traditional software development model, reducing both Time to Market and Development Costs are conflicting goals. Most companies have attacked Time to Market by: 1). reducing the scope of the product, 2). reducing the test time, and/or 3. reducing the scope of the test. Any hope of reducing the test time requires adding resources. By reducing the scope of the test you may be able to shorten the development cycle, but product quality and the resulting customer satisfaction will be impacted.
Many companies are trying to reduce the Cost of Quality Assurance by adding lower cost (offshore) resources to the mix. This is only a short term solution. By adding more resources, regardless of the incremental cost, the total costs will rise.
What Path Do You Want To Choose?
- Continue spending more and more funds, time and resources on testing each subsequent release in order to maintain the quality of the product at an acceptable level.
- Freeze the cost of testing (and defect fixing) of each release, and as a result - tolerate a drastic deterioration of the product’s quality.
- Implement a solution that will allow you to simultaneously:
- Increase the productivity of the whole Development Organization (Development and QA)
- Improve the quality of the application
- Reduce the level of spending on testing and defect fixing
Number 3 above is the obvious choice. To achieve number 3, the test process must be automated. Repetitive or redundant manual testing must be significantly reduced.
"Our quickest release takes about 3 months. qaSignature allowed us to release this product in under 2 months for a savings of 6 people for 5 weeks or 150 mandays." [Rough savings of $60k on one release]
Dennis Knoetgen, Director, MatrixOne, Inc.
Dennis was able to run an entire regression test overnight, flushing our defects that could be fixed the next day and verified that night. His team cut the time to market by over a third while reducing the cost of development. Don’t delay addressing your Time To Market.
In the next issue we will discuss Critical Reason Number 3.
By: Clayton Blaylock, Senior Vice President of qaSignature
Please e-mail your comments to cblaylock@qasignature.com or call me directly @ (617) 510-6545.
Click here for a PDF copy of the complete white paper:
«« Back to qaSignature Newsletter Archive“The proof of concept demonstrated the applicability of applying the qaSignature QA Automation Methodology to our Agile Development Process.”
- Keith Hillyard, Custom Engineering SQA Manager, Kronos
“The collaboration between the Ardais software development team and qaSignature brought immediate tangible results that quadrupled development team productivity, an accomplishment for which Ardais received a CIO 100 Award in 2003. Our investment made in automation and the ability to test applications overnight with virtually no manpower will translate into $1,000,000 savings in the next 12 months.”
- Martin Ferguson, Senior Vice President of Bioinformatics, Ardais
“Our quickest release takes about 3 months. qaSignature allowed us to release this product in under 2 months for a savings of 6 people for 5 weeks or 150 mandays.”
- Dennis Knoetgen, Director, MatrixOne