The software developer ranks are swelling, with industry pundits predicting an increase from million developers by 2024.
As software continues eating the world, developers are in great demand, and the skill pool will only shoot up. With the increased competition, developers need to up their expertise to remain competitive.
Part of that includes creating and shipping dependable software through effective quality assurance and software testing. Keep reading to learn why you should test your software and what factors impact this process.
1. Cost Efficiency
Quality assurance and testing in software development do come at a cost. You need to dedicate resources to vet the quality of the software you ship continually.
However, if you look at software tests as a cost center, you’ll miss out on one of its most critical advantages. Software tests and quality assurance help you manage costs in the long run.
How?
Imagine you are shipping a banking app. Due to an unchecked error in the code, users trying to sign up can’t access the service. The client behind the banking app will lose out on a significant number of clients.
Not only that, but depositors become wary whenever they see banking apps behaving unusually. Even if those clients don’t jump ship, they will resist using the said banking app for a while out of uncertainty.
As the developer, you need to continually vet your software to ensure you act on bugs and other issues promptly. If you can nip these problems in the bud, the folks at https://www.qualitylogic.com are sure you’ll reap the attendant cost-efficiency rewards by spending less on maintenance.
2. Stronger Security
Did you know that top companies across the United States have been paying on average $25 per hour due to cyber security? Even for smaller firms, the security threat is nothing to sniff at.
The alarming rise in cyber security threats has made users acutely aware of their need for secure software services.
Many of these users know they have to share their data with companies to receive personalized services. All they ask for is the software they can put their trust in and share their information with confidently.
Through effective software tests and quality assurance, your product can deliver that assurance to users. That’s because regular software checks help patch issues and eliminate vulnerabilities present in the product you ship.
The more users have faith in your software’s security, the bugger the moat you build in the market. Ultimately, that can lead to more sales and deeper user management.
3. Customer Satisfaction
For many businesses, getting their software into the hands of as many users as possible is the ultimate goal. Except, that isn’t a sustainable business model.
A better measure of whether your software (and, by extension, your business) can win and retain more business is gauging customer satisfaction. If a user leaves your product feeling well served, you have a repeat client on your hands.
As you rack up more repeat clients, you end up spending less money to acquire such users. And what’s the one thing that can help you satisfy users? Software with no bugs or glitches.
It’s, therefore, easy to draw a direct line from quality assurance and software checks all the way to your top line. In the end, well-executed software checks became a profit center that pays off in spades.
4. Better Productivity
When you make quality assurance and regular software checks part of your development, you increase your productivity. Sure, it takes less time to rush out software than painstakingly vet it before shipping.
However, that time saving is gobbled up by the many hours your team will have to take to correct such errors. The problem only compounds when these issues take much longer to fix in the production stage than in the design stage.
Add up all the instances where you have to do that kind of heavy lifting, and you have a time sink on your hands. When you make software tests, and quality checks a part of your workflow, you’ll save more time, which you can dedicate to higher productivity.
Factors That Impact Software Testing
If you don’t plan your testing strategy, you are planning to fail. Coordinating your testing with the rest of your development cycle is vital to ensure you keep to the timelines.
Planning is also critical in managing costs associated with testing and quality assurance. For every tweak you make, the tester has to run regression checks to ensure everything pans out.
The costs can quickly add up here. Unless you plan the vetting well, you’ll likely overshoot your budget.
When you plan well, you also leverage time favorably to test and ship your software. Better planning facilitates less time overall for software tests and shopping, which lifts your productivity.
Of course, how well your teammates work together will also impact software tests and quality assurance. If the team can communicate effectively and feed off its combined synergy, you’ll have a more effective software test process.
If you want to tighten your ship when it comes to software tests and quality assurance, you’ll need to audit the process you use. If you already have a mature testing process, you will take longer to execute any necessary software changes.
A mature process calls for more deliberation on the changes taking place to preserve stability. Inevitably, you’ll need to take more time to weigh each change and its implication lest you create more issues than you’re solving.
Your documentation also influences how rapidly you can test and deploy changes to keep going. As such, the goal here should be to invest in robust documentation to forestall any delays to the process.
Ship Software Users Can Rely On
Software plays a mission-critical part for virtually all organizations, and its dependability can’t be put into question.
To serve your clients well, invest significant resources in developing state-of-the-art software testing and quality assurance. You’ll lift your customer satisfaction rate, which will grow your business.
Differentiating yourself in software development is critical to your survival. Our website features technology and business information to empower you as you add value to your development. Check out more of our content to learn how you can craft software that changes users’ lives.
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