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eValid is the industry leading provider of Web quality assurance, functional testing and load testing solutions. In the course of our work we have run across many developers and QA pros for whom automated testing has been a real blessing. It has enabled them to deploy high quality, critical business applications on time and with high confidence.
We've also run into people who claim to have no use for automated testing. We suspect they've been burned by old-school client/server testing tools, which, sorry to say, have gained a reputation as being money pits. Sad to say, many of these sat on a shelf gathering dust while shell-shocked users retreated to manual testing methods.
So, with apologies to various pundits, eValid presents the "Top Five Bogus Excuses for Not Using Automated Testing Tools."
This is an oldie but goodie. Has there ever been a development project that went according to schedule? Does anyone know of a project where QA time wasn't cut at least in half in order to meet the deployment timeline? Automated testing can actually help a great deal in this scenario, enabling you to perform more tests (and more types of tests) in less time. Put another way, you can spend less time scripting, and more time testing using automated testing tools.
Don't let a few bad apples spoil the whole bunch. Not all automated testing tools are overpriced, and not all vendors are looking to gouge you. eValid testing tool licenses start at less than $1,000 and our hosted load testing solutions can bring down the cost even more while eliminating the need for you to develop a load-testing infrastructure. And don't even get us started about the cost of unplanned application downtime. A leading technology research group estimates that an online retailer will lose nearly $60,000 an hour if a critical application goes down. An online brokerage will lose $537,000 for just five minutes of downtime. Given those figures, doesn't it make sense to fix potential problems before they lead to downtime?
We know you've been hurt before. Legacy testing tools, most of which were originally developed for client/server environments, can be a bear to use. Some even require proprietary languages. But a new class of Web-based testing solutions enable you to create very complex scripts with no programming in just minutes. If it's been a while since you evaluated testing tools (i.e., more than two years), it would be worth your while to see what's out there now.
We'll try to break this to you gently -- you can't load test applications manually unless your expected load is smaller than your development team, and you can duplicate the production environment in your office. Companies have actually said to us, "We're all set -- we all stayed late one night and logged on to the application simultaneously -- it worked fine!" Chances are, your application will find its real-world load a little more taxing. Automated load testing is the only way to see how your application will truly hold up under a variety of load scenarios.
This is the favorite one of them all. No developer likes to think there could be any problems with his or her application -- but the fact is, eValid has helped thousands of companies test their applications, and we have NEVER been through a test that didn't find at least one problem. More often than not, we find several major ones.
One of our consultants has observed a particular psychological phenomenon within teams that trot out excuse number five. It's modeled after the more well-known "Four Phases of Grief," and we call it the "Four Phases of Software Testing."
The Four Phases of Software Testing are:
By the time they reach Acceptance, most people have been converted. Or so one would hope!
