Before undertaking an initiative to revamp and improve the Testing processes at CoreLink, it’s important to understand what business value Testing provides, and ensure any efforts to change the Testing processes are tied back to the business value drivers.
The business value provided by Testing activities and staff can be broken down into a few key points:
- Improved Customer Satisfaction – This is the obvious one, higher quality software leads to happier customers.
- Reduced Total Cost of Ownership – Poor quality costs money. Every bug, or piece of rework causes support costs, troubleshooting costs, additional development costs, testing costs, etc. In an ideal world we would release new features, they would work the first time, and the CoreLink staff would spend 100% of their time focused on adding additional capabilities to the systems. Every piece of rework represents time that the teams are not spending delivering new functionality.
- Reduced Lead Time\Cycle Time – Improvements to the Testing process can reduce the amount of time it takes to go from development complete, to production deployment. Ultimately this can increase the business agility of CoreLink, as they can more quickly go from request to delivery, enabling rapid reaction to changing customer and business demands.