One of the first questions that come to mind is “How much will it cost me to test this application?” Then ask yourself “What will it cost if I don’t test this application?” The answer is very simple: the cost to fix the application will be up to 10x more.
Things to think about:
- How much time has taken to understand the root cause of the issue?
- Understand the impact of the users affected with the issue.
- How quick can we understand the impact of the issue on other functional areas?
- How much time will it take to fix the issue?
- Until the issue is fixed, what will be the impact on the users that are currently using the application be?
- What will be the impact on the data that is been created with the issue in place?
- How much testing time will I need to spend once the issue is fixed?
- MOST important, how much confidence have I lost with the client with this issue being found by the users?
Taking into consideration all of these factors, any cost incurred will be far less than the cost that will need to fix that if found by the end-users.
Factors to Consider
There are different ways that one could test an application that would have different costs. One may want to manually test the application until they stop finding bugs. One may want to create automation scripts and test this in the future on their own. Also, do I have enough documentation to give this to someone to test or do I want them to create documentation to do so?
Who Should Test This Application?
Every application MUST go through testing and must be tested by someone who didn’t develop the application. What will the result be if the one who develops the application tests the application? Will all happy paths will be tested if the one who develops the code only is the only one who sees the application?
Consider how thorough the tester is. It is their responsibility to evaluate all paths of the application and precisely the Negative Path of the application.
What Kind Of Budget Do I Need?
Numerous factors go into finding out the budget that is required for testing the application. The application could be a single page like a Dashboard showing a variety of data so the data creation and testing this on the dashboard will take a considerable amount of time. The application could be a simple page with data on it to be entered and then tested if it working good. Here are the factors that you can consider for budgeting testing.
- What was the last year’s budget?
This is the easiest to calculate as the numbers are with you and those can be easily referred. This also gives you a better hold of the estimates as they are already proven and followed.
- The ratio of what was spent in the last few years.
Another way to estimate is to take the ration of all the budget that is been spent on testing for the past few years. This will give you the trend and will help you in coming with the number. However, taking into consideration the complexity of the application is important when taking the ratio and deriving the trends.
- The specific percentage of the time spent on programming.
According to CIOInsight, the percentage of testing budgets has moved from 18% in 2012 to 28% in 2015 and the trend is increasing. A 30% budget on the programming time is a comfortable budget to be spent on testing.
