The Importance of Software Testers

Software testing and quality assurance may not be the most glamorous aspects of software development, but they are two of the most essential. For your software to be successful, it’s vital to ensure that it’s thoroughly tested and meets all quality requirements

Poorly executed software can lead to many headaches for users and developers alike. This article will discuss the importance of software testing and quality assurance and how they can help your software reach its full potential.

Why You Should Always Use Software Testers

With so much of our lives living in the digital world these days, the influence of software is far more significant than ever before. Since many of our daily software platforms are so entrenched within our daily lives, many of us rarely pay attention to the functionality of these platforms – except when something goes wrong or something breaks.

Back in October 2021, Facebook and its many subsidiaries had a routing glitch and shut down for six to seven hours, resulting in millions of dollars in revenue loss and many disgruntled users. While many of us are not dealing with this high revenue stream from a broken app or website – we can still feel the sting if our software breaks. A small business owner or entrepreneur with custom software or off-the-shelf solutions that break – is a recipe for disaster.

While the average time a customer is on a website is 15 seconds – imagine how fast they will leave if the website is broken or the app is slow, buggy or unresponsive. You guessed it – even faster. To avoid gaps in service or disgruntled customers, properly test your software and perform quality assurance on everything that goes through your team. You will be thanking yourself later.

How Software Testers Properly Test Your Software

When it comes to testing your software, there are many different methods and strategies that testers use. The testing strategy may vary depending on the type of software, the features being deployed, etc. However, some of the more standard methods include:

Unit Testing: This is a method where individual components or units of code are tested to ensure they are working as expected. This is typically done by the developer working on the piece before the code is merged into the main codebase.

Integration Testing: This method tests how different components of the software work together. This is important to ensure that there are no conflicts between other parts of the code and they work in sync together.

Functional Testing: As the name suggests, this method tests the software’s functionality to ensure that it meets all requirements and works as expected.

System Test: Is known as end-to-end testing –as it verifies the entire software. This test provides a comprehensive report on your entire system’s compliance and performance, including all of the business, specified requirements.

User Acceptance Testing: This testing is usually done by actual users or customers to see if they can use the software without any issues. It is crucial to get feedback from actual users to see if any areas need improvement.

No matter what software you’re testing, you need to have a plan and strategy in place. Without a plan, it’s easy to miss important details or overlook potential issues. A good testing strategy should be comprehensive and cover all aspects of the software.

But I already hired developers to build my software- shouldn’t they test it before launch?

The short answer is yes; developers test their code before it’s merged into the main codebase. However, developers are not always the best people to test their own code. This is because they are usually too close to the project and might miss some crucial details. Getting a second pair of eyes on the project is always good practice to catch any potential issues.

This is where testers come in. Testers are usually different people from the development team, and it’s their job to find as many bugs and issues as possible. They’re generally billed at a lower hourly rate than developers which makes it more cost effective to spend more of their hours testing versus the developers. Testers will use automated and manual methods to try and break the software in every possible way. By doing this, they can help improve the quality of the software before it goes live.

Unfortunately, many people overlook hiring testers after a new software build. They either think that developers will catch all the bugs, or they don’t want to spend the extra money on testers. However, it will benefit you to hire a fresh set of eyes on your new piece of content as they can help catch any missed bugs and issues before launch.

What are some benefits of Software Testers?

Hiring software testers for your piece of software has many more benefits than just “finding bugs.” Some of these other benefits include:

• improved quality of the software
• fewer bugs and issues after launch
• happier customers and users
• improved reputation for your company
• saved time and money in the long-term

These are just some of the benefits of software testers – there are many more. If you want to improve the quality of your software, you should invest in software testers before you launch any new websites or apps.

Can You Build Perfect Software without Bugs

Software bugs exist in all forms of software including products like Apple iPhones, Google chrome browsers and Microsoft office. We put up with a certain amount of these software bugs because it would be incredibly expensive to write and test perfect software. In addition, it could take years to build some software solutions which isn’t practical. A great discussion on writing perfect software can be found in this article.

Invest In The Future Of Your Software

Software testing and quality assurance are essential for any business that relies on software to function – which these days are just about every business. If you want to ensure that your software is up to par, don’t wait until something goes wrong – invest in testing and quality assurance from the start.

At Flint Hills Group, we have a team of highly-trained dedicated software testers that we put on each of our projects. Contact us today to avoid costly downtime or unhappy customers by catching bugs and issues early on. Ultimately, saving you time and money in the long run.