Tuesday, September 25, 2018

Bugs in your web & mobile apps are bleeding you an ASTOUNDING amount of money

There are an unending list of reasons that compel SaaS companies and digital teams to ship each release at greater speeds. Your customers demand more responsiveness, your business demands more revenue and your competition isn't slowing down so why should you? This need for speed often leads software delivery teams to take shortcuts and turn a blind eye to spot fires that, seemingly "from nowhere" turn into soul-sapping infernos. Know what I mean?

Don't kid yourself because this feeling isn't just a figment of your vivid imagination, nor is it merely anecdotal evidence. A study by Big Blue found that it can cost you up to 100x more to fix bugs after they've been shipped as compared to during the development phase! Close your eyes and take this in for a moment: up to 100x more to fix those bugs that you're allowing to leak through into production.
The secret toolbox to finding bugs before you ship your web or mobile application

Any wonder then why the costs of software testing are skyrocketing?

The kicker is that this is not a problem that affects your processes and your financials. The stress caused by the increased velocity of releases hitting production is just as crippling on your team, especially as DevOps uptake increases without a thorough understanding of what the framework actually requires:

So what's the opposite of stress? Certainty, right? And what comes from certainty? Spot on, it's peace of mind. Our customers have solved this vicious cycle of late releases, bug-infested releases and cost blowouts have told us that this peace of mind they achieve far surpasses any technical or procedural benefit to revamping and optimising their software quality programs. The one thing they really don't miss is the anxiety that used to attack them before and after every release.

How different could your life be if you didn't have to wonder "what's going to go wrong today" every time your web and mobile apps went live?

So how do you find & fix bugs in your application before shipping?

First, you must accept that there is no silver bullet. The good news is that it can be done and there are lots of examples and actionable techniques that you can implement to make this happen.

The solution to this problem is a confluence of the 3 P's:

  • People, including not just your functional software testers, but also your developers, architects and your security testing team; and
  • Processes, the systems and communication channels you employ to ensure that most, if not all, bugs are consistently found before going live; and
  • Products (or software test tools), that ensure your teams get real-time analytics and insights about the spot fires that need to be handled before releasing.

We've seen across industries that it's very easy to over-complicate this process. But to achieve real, sustainable and material results you need to make evidence-based decisions and keep it very simple so that you don't confuse your team during this process.

A big problem we've seen is the lack of any actionable and insightful dashboards or reports in even very "popular" testing tools. This problem is exacerbated within organisations that cobble together different open-source tools to conduct their software testing activities - if you use a standard version of Selenium your company probably falls into this category.

Before adopting an open-source technology professionals often focus on what it will do for them. Commonly, they completely forget to work out what it will not do for them. By not conducting this last analysis you run the risk of having large gaps in your software testing program. These gaps often will make it very difficult for you to make data-driven or evidence-based decisions.

Reporting/dashboards/metadata presentation, in particular, are very difficult to standardise. That's why this area is often neglected in open source tools, like Selenium and Appium. The best automated software testing tools provide this reporting functions, alongside all the actual testing functionality you need.

Having the ability to visualise your testing metadata, make data-driven decisions and calculate ROI alone might be worth paying the monthly subscriptions.

A framework you can follow to fix your cloud software & mobile app testing program

This is probably what you really came here for, so here it is:

  • Optimise the way you document and communicate your tests across your team
  • Ensure consistency between your test environments
  • Optimise the data sets for every test
  • Automate test scope selection and test execution
  • There are 5 other rules that you will find in our Secret Toolbox, which you can implement straight away without hiring any external consultants!

Our Secret Toolbox is literally our playbook of strategies that we implement for every customer. It has been refined over the years to make it useful for all SaaS and digital teams, irrespective of the methodologies or structures they follow. By applying the action items in the Secret Toolbox, you won't fix all your headaches, but you will achieve this:

  1. Slash your software testing time from weeks or days to hours.
  2. Reduce the number bugs that leak into production.
  3. Minimise the direct and indirect (eg. support tickets) cost of software quality.
  4. Eliminate the anxiety and stress that accompanies each release.

If you think these outcomes could positively impact your company's bottom line, your customers' happiness and your peace of mind, start implementing the Secret Toolbox or go one step further and book a demo of our Qsome autoamted software testing tool to see how it will work in your environment:

Or call us on +61 3 7001 1430 or +44 20 3411 4974 if you're in the UK, or email solutions[at]audacix.com
 
SaaS Brief