Why you should start testing

In a broader sense, software testing is a software quality control technique, which includes test design, test execution and analysis of the results obtained. Software testing offers lots of advantages, some of them are described below.

Speed up your time to market

"To measure is to know" is a famous quote from Lord Kelvin. When it comes to software delivery it’s better not to take risks since things can go wrong badly. Software testing can provide insights which can improve your decision making process and thus reduce your time to market. It's a mean to measure the quality and progress of a software product. In order to achieve this, you should start testing early and often. Test automation is often adopted for this purpose, it does not only accelerate the testing process but also helps in delivering high-quality products and faster time-to-market. That leaves the question, how will that affect budget?

Reduce your budget

It is always harder to correct a mistake than to prevent it. Furthermore, it is much more expensive. If they are not detected on time, it will be much harder to fix them. Mainly because it already create a new chain of impact, and they can easily affect another functionality or hide a lot of different defects.
Kent Beck sums it up like this:

Most defects end up costing more than it would have cost to prevent them. Defects are expensive when they occur, both the direct costs of fixing the defects and the indirect costs because of damaged relationships, lost business, and lost development time.

Adittionally excellent quality contributes to a significant increase in customer satisfaction as well as lower maintenance costs. And this brings us to another point.

Improve your quality

Quality is not the number of defects in your final conclusion nor is it putting checkmarks on a check list. Quality is context dependant, it is about asking the right questions and taking into account the right things at the right moment. Since people's lifes are heavy dependant on software every organisation that builds software should strive for high quality.

All of this does not mean all software is doomed to fail – far from it.
Many big tech companies, and smaller startups, deliver high-quality software at speed with the help of a structured QA strategy and testing infrastructure in place.
Are you already one of them?