Building a Business Case: The Top 6 Reasons to Invest in a Proper Testing Program

A great all-around customer experience is vital, as the average person spends less than one second forming an opinion about any given website. So, why would a company overlook the testing of their website, essentially putting themselves at a disadvantage by not mitigating risk before site launch? Because it requires a monetary investment.

Businesses can’t afford to lose customers to broken websites or applications, and automation testing is a fundamental part of ensuring quality in a variety of ways. Throughout a software product’s lifecycle, it will undergo many changes in response to real-world usage. For example, today’s Facebook and Google look nothing like their original incarnations.

Automated test scripts put products through rigorous testing scenarios that can’t be replicated with humans alone. It streamlines the process through a test automation framework that allows quality analysts and developers to test the platform’s functionality limits more comprehensively. This ensures bugs can be found and fixed before they become a bigger problem.

Sounds like a great strategy for any company, right? So, let us help you get the support you need to build a proper testing program. When building a persuasive business case for a fit-for-purpose testing approach, be sure to incorporate these six ideas to support your proposal to leadership. You can thank us later.

1. Automation Ensures Greater Compliance

Compliance is increasingly important as regulators around the world adjust to new technologies. According to the Brookings Institute, these tech-focused regulations are likely to define this decade. Laws like the EU’s GDPR and California’s CCPA are leading the way, but businesses have to keep an eye on other agencies like the SEC and even the FDA, as both are becoming more tech-centric than ever before.

As legislation regulating technology continues to pop up, it’s wise to prepare for impending rules ahead of time by ensuring all your applications, software, and implementations meet these regulations. Compliance-focused leaders will be more willing to fund testing automation once they understand that it can test for compliance as well.

2. Automation Allows for Proactive Issue Identification

Lack of automation testing leads to failed deployments, which ultimately creates poor user satisfaction. Proactive monitoring ensures systems (especially configured solutions) maintain their integrity and continue to work during frequent and out-of-the-blue updates.

A test automation framework should also monitor for upcoming updates, allowing potential outage issues to be addressed before they occur. This keeps your team working proactively to improve the end-user experience instead of perpetually reacting to customer complaints.

3. Automation Optimizes Resources

Testing requires a lot of resources. Engineering talent is constantly pulled between development and testing, making it difficult to move forward. This can quickly create an environment where your development team is exhausted, and their performance starts to suffer. Studies show fatigue can cause distraction, forgetfulness, and mistakes, among other problems.

Deployments and releases will continue at a fast pace, so it’s important to optimize resources for the delivery of applications and systems alongside these deployments. Major apps can be updated as often as once a week, and that could easily keep your entire development team stuck in an endless loop of work.

Automation testing offloads the more routine and repetitive tasks to keep engineers fresh and productive. By investing in testing automation, your business leadership is freeing up engineers for higher-level tasks that are more fulfilling for them while creating more value for your company.

4. Automation Simplifies the Creation of Test Environments

Some applications require a lot of integrations and dependencies that could make creating a testing environment difficult. A test automation framework simplifies this process to allow for more complex testing environments, such as those that better suit software packages for custom applications.

By investing in testing automation, your company can spend less time developing testing environments and more time focusing on improving product shortcomings.

5. Automation Preserves Legacy Knowledge

Automated test scripts don’t just run; they also record what the system is doing while documenting its unique specifications. Previously, a developer or tester leaving your organization would mean the loss of legacy information, but now leadership can close this gap by funding test automation. While human documentation is still important, it can’t compare with the “always on” intensity of automated test scripts. Without test automation, keeping up with manual processes could bury a project.

6. Automation Offers Test Data Analysis

The more useful data your company can feed into its test automation, the better. System integrity depends on data, and that’s difficult to collect and analyze when developers are stuck in manual testing loops. They may not keep up with requirements or even understand what good data looks like without the capability to collect all data.

Using test automation, your company can build confidence in system integrity by making test data available throughout the lifecycle. This data will be instrumental in driving future development, as well as keeping pace with the market.

Many businesses are already using automated testing, and those that aren’t are finding it difficult to compete. Technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, and organizations with a solid test automation framework are positioned to become and remain market leaders. Testing is a foundational part of modern digital transformation services—it can be the difference between thriving and going out of business.

Ready to hit the ground running? Then check out the four steps needed to implement a successful test automation strategy. If you still want to learn more about how testing can improve your business outcomes—and how CTG can help make that happen—contact us today.