Software testing is perhaps the least glamorous part of software development. All too often, as deadlines are looming, developers are forced to ‘just code’ and hope that their software works. This approach is counter-productive and it is unfortunate that it still persists in this day and age.
Developers that fail to engage in regular testing will find that they are wasting a lot of money. It can cost 10 to 100 – or more! – times as much to fix a bug ‘in the wild’ than it would to fix it before your software is released. The bad PR associated with releasing a buggy product, and the support burden of creating, testing and then releasing a patch, is both time consuming and expensive; in addition, it is difficult for a brand to recover from.
Many angles for testing
Software testing can cover a lot of angles: unit testing and integration testing, load testing of your servers, acceptance testing and system testing. By checking each part of your software regularly throughout the development process, you can ensure that it is as robust as possible.
The case for outsourcing
It is a good idea for developers to get into the habit of running tests throughout the development process, with some great frameworks out there that will support automated testing. These can spot a lot of the under-the-hood bugs and potential security problems. Unit testing is particularly easy to integrate, but it is something that must be done early on in the project. If you wait too long to start testing, fitting the tests into your code will be incredibly difficult.
Later in the project, when there may be usability issues that it is harder for frameworks to identify, outsourcing to software testing services could be a good idea. The Bug Finders Software testing service, for example, can offer detailed reports and will ‘attack’ your software from all angles to find issues and bugs.
Outsourcing your testing will help to free up your developers’ time so that they can focus on the code itself. It may take a while for the developers to appreciate what the testers can do for them; however, once the team gets used to working together, it is likely to result in better and more secure products.