According to a leading global market research firm, software testing spend was at 79bn in 2010 and the figure is to climb to 100bn by 2014. It has become the fastest growing primary areas of corporate investment. This is because organizations now greatly appreciate of what the cost of insufficient and misdirected testing can do to their business. Now – this is good news for all the software testing service providers globally! But as service providers how do you plan to capitalize this opportunity?
Given that testing services have become a commoditized market, how do plan to differentiate your offerings from other thousands of players – both locally and globally?
Even though the global spending on test automation is rising, what makes you sure that this software testing spend is equal to outsourced testing services revenue?
Being in talks with global product players in banking, technology, automotive all I see as common thread is to aggressively build highly scalable testing processes internally. This is not because you are not competent but scope of outcomes from an outsourcing-offshoring engagement is limited even today. You might get new projects because of your domain expertise or experience or the cost arbitrage. But, how can you increase the value of the services in the eye of the buyer without impacting profitability?
What if you could bill your customers completely on specific actions and outcomes you drive? I know you know about it. Have thought about it. Have also done it partially. But you also know you can’t completely offer such an engagement. This is not because you don’t want to. But due to lack of maturity in today’s testing technology. You can’t evade its upfront investment which today is justified by revenues through the time and material model.
Let’s take a very basic example here. You charge the client per bug you find. The more bugs you find the more money you make. But, for the client it doesn’t matter if it is done through manual testing or test automation. But how do you evade its upfront investment? For finding those many bugs through manual testing you need more testers in a given span of time. With test automation it is sure you would be faster and also ensure significant coverage but what about time invested in setting it up? You need highly skilled automation coders, investments in automation tool licenses and other infrastructure. You might have a variety of accelerators but they are also falling short to contain your costs on setting up an efficient testing process for a new client. Your costs are fixed – salaries, tools, hardware and software, infrastructure. This forms the core of your automation cost.
What’re you going for today? How do plan to increase profitability without affecting service quality? How can you increase quality assurance for their clients without increasing costs to deliver such assurance?
The answer lies in how quickly and easily service providers build scalable and maintainable test automation. The answer lies in scriptless test automation.
Scriptless test automation is an approach that empowers manual testers to build test automation within budget, before time and without any scripting involved. It is an approach to increase the maintainability and scalability of automation. It is an approach to reduce the cost of automation. It is an approach to increase the assurance of quality on a product. It is an approach that will help service providers like you to convert each resource including man and machine profitable.
I am aware you know what scriptless is. But, the idea here is pass on that it is actually within your reach. You can do it.
There are many reasons to adopt a scriptless approach. Benefits are plenty and ROI realization is much quicker. One should contemplate what makes script based test automation so expensive and how scriptless makes test automation a pleasurable experience. Also one should calculate how scriptless impacts testing ROI.