Oct 16, 2019
5 Reasons To Win Over Your CIO on The Importance of Testing
We all know the importance of QA but does your CIO and the team of C-level executives really care?
Understandably the executive and development teams have differing priorities, however, testing should be taken seriously across the whole organisation. By completing well managed testing of your products early, often and consistently, your product will ultimately get to market faster. It also reduces instances of defective software resulting in unsatisfied users. With the right testing strategy in place, you can avoid costly errors, inspire further innovation and get to market sooner meaning higher revenue.
Most importantly, your CIO is more concerned about operational viability, capex reduction and operational efficiency rather than technical granularity of testing and deployment. Below, we have outlined some 5 key arguments related to the concerns of your CIO that will help them understand the importance of testing:
1. Mitigate unsatisfied users
To reduce the risk of customers doing the testing for you, you need to do the right testing and properly before it goes to market. Pro-active and real time monitoring of production logs to have a continuous feedback loop into the regression testing regime can help prevent critical customer experience issues. If not mitigated this can lead to high user dissatisfaction resulting in revenue loss and the potential for any data saved in your software to be breached. The solution? Do risk-based testing for optimum coverage and CX testing to focus on end consumer before it gets to market.
2. Automated Testing to ensure a good ROI
Testing is imperative to ensure the money spent on development is well spent. There is no point having your CIO pour money into developing without actually testing to see if the new product is doing what it’s meant to.
Ensuring your new software delivers as planned to your requirements and using automated testing is the simplest way to ensure the money you have spent developing and engineering this product was, in fact, well spent. Testing in phases will ensure the final product is worth the investment.
3. Invest in consistent and repeatable testing and tooling
The most common phase in testing is in the final stages of development. This is a valid phase to complete testing, however, good developers know testing needs to be done earlier and more frequently. If anything major is uncovered in the final phase, or something as simple as being understaffed for any reason can have a major impact on your release date. Being on time in such a competitive market is imperative.
4. Invest in your testers
Having a team of expert testers is imperative to the efficiency of your testing process and development as a whole. In many cases developers are left with the duties of carrying out the testing. From a CIO perspective this may seem efficient, however, development and testing require two different skill sets.
Whilst employing developers who can also test can be seen as beneficial, asking any employee to move between two job types will always decrease their efficiency and therefore the project efficiency. Developers also, generally speaking, lack the ability to test from the user perspective. We advise cross training your testers to be multi-disciplinary (ie BA tester or SDET) and to have a sufficient knowledge management system to avoid single point dependencies.
5. Expert testers give real-time feedback
Having a dedicated team of testers also ensures you get real-time feedback on your product. Performing testing early on in the development process can ensure adequate feedback from a user perspective on what works, needs fixing or if anything is just not achievable.
Conversely, receiving this feedback in the final stage of development means there could be a fundamental issue that could lead to major redevelopment that could have been rectified earlier in the process if detected. Alternatively, if this feedback is missed altogether and comes back from the customer, this will reduce user satisfaction and any potential redevelopment becomes very costly.
There are numerous benefits to testing consistently and repetitively throughout your development process and it is imperative your C-level executives understand these benefits too. Working together to ensure the software you are creating is delivering as promised is absolutely critical to the success of your product. Testing ensures you have developed the perfect product you set out to produce.
Enex Consulting was formed in 2014 by industry veterans from the enterprise software delivery and testing industry in partnership with a number of specific clients to address the lack of high-quality engagements currently offered in the market. We specialise in large program delivery, testing strategy and capability / maturity assessments, DevOps alignment and organisational digital transformations.
We specialise in delivering our clients program objectives by partnering with them to transform their existing IT landscapes into their future Digital Vision on time and within budget.