Going to market with a perfectly functioning product is a great way to attract customers and cement relationships with them. And for many software product or service companies, that’s their goal.
But many others are resistant to the idea of allocating budget toward the thorough QA testing required to achieve that goal. Their reasons range from “Our developers are smart, they can test their own code” to “We don’t know if QA will provide good ROI.”
But, as the recent spike in data breaches and hacking has shown, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
QA testing companies know that their services make a difference, and when they do their best work, they can save their clients a lot of money.
Here are the top three ways that QA providers help their clients ship strong, robust products and reduce their spend in the process:
QA engineers find defects earlier
Once a bug makes its way into the production stage, you’re looking at around 15 hours of developer's time to fix it. Yikes! When QA takes place alongside development during the coding stage, engineers get to test in-tandem. This helps expose bugs as they’re written, and it helps your team save tons of time -- bugs discovered at the coding stage take 5 hours on average to fix.
It takes about 15 hours to fix a bug in production. QA testing companies can make it 5. (Click to tweet)
With the money you save on long, drawn-out, last-minute fixes, you can invest in planning and designing new features.
Dev and QA collaborate and resolve defects together
As more and more product companies realize that working in silos is counterproductive to efficiency and quality, best practices that call for collaboration are becoming more popular. Peer code reviews are an example of this approach, and it’s as simple as it sounds -- but incredibly effective in weeding out bugs.
But before code gets submitted for peer review, QA testing companies have their engineers check it over themselves. This personal review helps reduce bugs related to functionality, incorrect logic, or certain missing conditions -- all of which can fester and become time-consuming (and thus costly) to fix later on.
In peer reviews, a developer typically pairs up with a QA engineer who understands the functionality of the code very well. They work together to parse the code, paying close attention to how it actually functions and how it should function, and fixing any issues along the way. In this way, prevention and budget savings become a team effort and a foundational part of the software development culture.
Review mistakes and avoid making them again
So, we’ve learned that finding bugs early is good way to save money. Now what? The answer is simple, in theory -- study the bugs and learn how to avoid them in the future! After each release, dev and QA teams should hold a retrospective meeting to review the bugs they found and fixed. In addition to the knowledge sharing, the meeting should yield concrete, actionable processes:
- Reduce defects and improve quality -- What actions can your teams take next time to avoid the same bugs?
- Apply expertise and remove bottlenecks -- What exactly went wrong, and when was the defect first introduced? Get insight from your software engineering team on how to avoid these mistakes again.
- Target the systematic errors -- Accidents happen, and they’re easily repeated. Target these and educate your engineers on their impact.
- Implement new processes -- Meet more often, educate engineers on common or systematic defects, and track your defect count so you know whether they’re increasing or decreasing over time.
