In this competitive world, time to market is crucial to put companies one step ahead of their competition. That’s why many organizations are investing in agile application development because of time and money savings. When ‘building software fast’, assuring the quality of the delivery can end up being a real challenge if not addressed correctly, compromising the final product and customer satisfaction.
This can bring major challenges. It is not only necessary to build agile, but also to test agile. By extensively testing applications, bugs can be discovered at an early stage and high quality can be guaranteed. The question is not whether there are bugs in an application, but when they will be discovered. The only code that does not contain bugs is the code that has not yet been written. By quickly detecting risks and accidental bugs, the costs of fixing them are lower.
Let’s have a look at the Samsung Note 7’s example. This smartphone was already in production when a bug was discovered. The bug fix cost Samsung nearly $17 billion as it wasn’t found in an earlier stage of the software development life cycle. In this blog post, I will discuss three things that ensure a better quality for applications, without extending the time-to-market.
Fail fast, fail often
So the focus is on detecting bugs quickly. This concept is also called ‘fail fast’. This means that you want to detect and repair the errors as quickly as possible during the development process. The longer it takes for a problem to surface, the more difficult and longer it takes to fix and the higher is the cost, as in Samsung’s example. This is also visible in the Boehm curve: the costs of rectifying a fault during production are exponentially higher than the solution of this fault in the design phase. Testing applications properly and efficiently requires expertise. Since the project goals have to be achieved one by one in short periods of time, there is no time to perform all the tests. Therefore, the focus is on the software application’s features and functionalities that have more impact and possibly more defects. This approach is called risk-based testing. As a result, the best quality possible of the software is developed in the available time. After all, building quickly should not be at the expense of quality, with a poor end result and dissatisfied customers as a result.
Testing applications is a specialty
It is not only important to test risk-based agile, but also to engage test specialists. Developers are focused on creating applications and focus on the end result and usage. That is why it is important to use a Quality Assurance team and involve them from the start in the project development. This team ensures the best quality of the application through transparency, effectiveness while performing various tests, both functional and non-functional.This can include testing with regard to functionality, security, performance, usability, accessibility, and others. This way, various errors can be discovered earlier, avoiding causing problems in the future, such as leakage of confidential information, unavailability of the system, or unexpected error messages for the end-user. The impact of this can be much worse than a system failure or a software crash. In addition, it is essential to check that all functions actually work correctly on different devices in order to create a perfect experience for the end-user.
Short time-to-market with agile development and testing
There is no denying that post-implementation errors can have a significant impact on applications. Quality Assurance teams make sure that unnecessary costs and delays in the time-to-market are avoided, and that bugs are quickly discovered when working according to the ‘fail fast’ principle. Building and testing agile applications are crucial here. Quality Assurance Specialists make the digital transformation smoother by using different types of testing before the final release. Error-free applications do not exist, but by deploying agile application development and testing side by side, applications can be launched with a short time-to-market and with good quality.
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To read the original version in Dutch please click here.
Published 3rd May 2021
