Though testing is growing increasingly expensive, complete testing is not an unobtainable hypothetical. Recent Bloor Research concludes that a reluctance to prioritise improving the internal testing process reflects a short-sightedness on the part of CIOs. An investment in test automation tooling can save both time and costs, in turn avoiding the impact of defects, both internally and on a business’ bottom line.
Bloor Research Director Philip Howard suggests that budget constraints, time pressures and inadequate tooling are preventing organisations from testing software fully.
He comments how CIOs view testing as a costly inconvenience, with testing now representing as much as half of development costs. This is supported by a recent survey of 1543 CIOs conducted by Capgemini and HP, which found that the amount of development budget devoted to testing has increased by 23% in the past year.[1]
CIOs are therefore compromising testing in order to deliver software on time and within budget. Quality is being lost in this trade off, leading to software that does not meet a critical business requirement or is too buggy to use, as Howard describes. He further comments on how the business then suffers from the frustrating cost of rework, as well as the adverse effect on internal morale and company reputation caused by poor quality software.
Fortunately, Howard argues that testing does not need to be the costly inconvenience that CIOs think it is. His analysis suggests that investing in tooling can alleviate the budget restraints and time pressures that complete testing, making it an achievable reality.
In particular, Howard argues that flowchart modelling and solid requirements building allows organisations to improve their testing processes. Such technology will pay for itself as it allows testers to remove the redundant and unnecessary tests which effectively reduce budget, while avoiding the cost of defects in the long term.
Howard describes how flowchart modelling allows organisations to create unambiguous flowcharts from requirements, reducing software to a series of ‘what if, then this’ (cause and effect) processes. Testers can then tailor test cases to requirements. Using mathematical algorithms they can prioritise test cases based on how frequently a particular action is expected to occur, and can further link these test cases to the type of data the software will encounter.
Flowchart tools can help to reduce time and cost overruns by avoiding redundant or over-testing. Howard’s argument is supported by how the removal of duplicate, invalid or redundant tests can reduce test cycles by as much as 30%.
The reduction in time and cost is nowhere more seen than when a change to requirements is made. Howard notes how organisations often opt for the simpler but inefficient choice of repeating all tests in order to ensure complete coverage. Using flowcharts means that one can easily flag up changes to requirements, for example colour-coding blocks that have been changed. This means that testers can easily identify what paths through the software have been affected by change, re-testing only what needs to be.
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