Why software testing is important

Testing was not something that seemed to be very important and in my opinion, testers were only software engineers who cannot code and because of that, they had to switch to testing.

Over the years, I gained deep insights into that project and had the opportunity to work on all the different areas. Because of that, I was working in areas like “run-the-bank” where I had to do root cause analysis in a z/OS mainframe system / COBOL code, business analysis, compliance filtering, and here it comes, testing.

The first time I dived into testing, I didn’t quite understand why they even perform tests, since I as a developer already tested all my code so that it would run correctly and do the things as expected. I was forced to execute lots of manual test cases, which helped me to understand what the application was supposed to do. This was the moment when I understood, there is a business perspective on an application and that it differs from a technical perspective. I was, back then, fascinated that there have been lots of automated test cases that were run with every build and deployment to another stage.

When I finally had to put my hands on the compliance filtering, testing started to finally make sense to me. For a bank, it is very important to get this right. There is no room for mistakes. If a bank would be caught doing money laundering, because certain filters didn’t work correctly, this could be a loss of reputation which means losing customers, which leads to a loss of revenue.

This made clear to me, software testing is important. It is important in a way, that if you do not do it, it can lead to losing lots of money or even worse, you can lose your reputation and with that, you can lose your customers and even more money.

If you google a bit, you will find many entries about companies losing millions of dollars, because of faulty software. Traders losing hundreds of millions, because of a wrong line of code. Web hosters losing customers because of an untested code snippet. The list is long and the amount of money lost because of bad quality is stated to be as high as up to a trillion dollars in the year 2016 alone, according to Tricentis.

So this is a shout out to all of you developers, project leaders, product owners, CEO’s, basically to everyone involved in the process of developing software, creating new and fascinating products. Do not forget to spend some time and money on testing your great ideas. In a time where your customers can complain everywhere at any time on so many platforms, it is crucial to delivering high quality.