Automated software tests

Do we need them ?

Need for growth

• Companies need to keep growing, to stay where they are, in an increasingly competitive market

• Growth starts by getting more business (getting our foot into the customers door)

• And staying there by retaining that customer over time

Software quality

• Software quality has four parameters – outer quality, inner quality, short term quality and long term quality

• We need to have inner quality AND outer quality AND short term AND long term quality. Only then have we truly fulfilled customer expectation

Process for a software company

• Since we get a customer by more sales, but keep him by more quality

• And since Software quality has 4 different , independent factors

• It stands to reason that we need very strong quality processes for a software company to keep a customer

Why process quality

• Process quality ensures that quality is built into the making of the product or service itself

• This ensures that ‘quality’ is one of the ‘secret’ ingredients of the product ,as far as possible

Who has the time for quality ?

• Remember that a manager or customer will only talk of delivery until a product reaches the customer

• After the customer starts to use it, the same managers and customers will only talk of quality related concerns and problems

• ‘Built in quality’ tries to address all these post delivery concerns before hand so that you save your time and money and help your customers be less worried

Why automated tests ?

• As practitioners, we ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’. Many of them recommend building in automated test suites as part of the software process

• Should we try everything these experts tell us ? No. But we can do a PDCA on them

• So try automated tests and analyze it objectively

Conclusion

• Try it out in a small part of your project and see

• Put yourself in the shoes of the customer. Would you like if your vendor had that level of rigor in his process ? Or would you rather like a manual tester checking it later ? What if that tester made a mistake ?