The Economics of Software Testing

The Economics of Software Testing in Relation to Market Considerations, Development Process and Product Type

The broad area of analysis of this talk is the return of invest (ROI) of testing activities. Testing is a key quality assurance task. And since the quality is an important asset of the product market success, testing therefore plays a role in terms of customer acceptance and sales figures. A question discussed by this talk is how to determine and quantify the contribution of the testing activities to the market performance of the product under test. And considering the fact that the quality itself as an asset of the product might weight differently according to the product market positioning (e.g. premium products vs. low price segments) the market relevance of quality assurance activities in general and testing in particular is expected to change accordingly.

Other parameters that influence the test process and shape its activities are the implemented development model and the type of the product under test. For instance agile processes require another approach to testing than the sequential V-Model. And the product type might also makes a test sub process necessary or obsolete. While embedded software products generally require cross compiling and the installation of the artifacts on an additional target device, these steps are often obsolete in web-based applications. The related question discussed in this talk is how all these variations do affect the return of invest analysis of the testing tasks.

It appears therefore very convenient to develop indicators to check the performance of the implemented test process itself and its supporting activities. The indicators shall refer directly to targeted sales figures.

The talk will first outline its context and introduce required definitions such as quality objectives, market positioning, development models and the benefits of testing. Second, we will discuss popular software test efficiency indicators and metrics and contrast them with the perspectives of the talk assessing how they include or do not include market considerations, the used development model and the type of the product. And finally, the talk will analyze possible missing parts and propose own approaches to indicators and metrics leaning on the one already discussed.

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