The Risks of Not Testing Software or Performing Minimal Testing

Businesses & startups test their ideas and products in a combination of ways. The most common methods include conducting market research and gathering feedback from potential customers.

It is an effective strategy for refining products and making sure they meet the needs of their target market. Getting customer feedback is good, but getting the actual product feedback directly from them can be disastrous.

The purpose of this article is to explain the importance of testing your software, as well as the risks associated with performing minimal testing. 

Introduction: The Importance of Testing

Let us first understand the importance of testing before we discuss the risks associated with minimal or no testing. Performing testing on your project is like placing a safety net around it. Before releasing your product, this can help you determine potential challenges or issues and inspire your team to discover better solutions.

Testing is an essential part of software development and deployment. It helps to provide the quality of the delivered product and identify potential issues that may occur after the product has been released. 

Testing can help you to: 

• Identify bugs 
• Address security vulnerabilities
• Increase user satisfaction
• Avoid unknown pitfalls
• Advocate for business risks
• Improve the sellability of the product
• Demonstrate if the product holds true against its marketing claims
• Decrease the risk of costly rework or recalls and much more

To put it simply, it is an important step in the software development process and can help to assure that the product meets the user’s requirements and expectations.

The Risks of Not Testing Software or Performing Minimal Testing

Like health, quality is oftentimes an afterthought. While you can get by without much testing in the early/beta stages of your product, creating scalable and complex products without any testing safety net becomes increasingly difficult. When you are interested in product development and your product development procedure does not contain any or very little testing, you are very likely to meet the following risks:

1. Poor Quality: 

Without a suitable testing technique, there is no way to assure the quality of a product or system. A product or system that isn’t tested or is not tested enough can have unexpected mistakes and bugs. A quality product is what every customer spends in the end. You can lose revenue and sales as an outcome of a low-quality product.

2. Security Vulnerabilities: 

With strict data privacy guidelines being implemented by the local and national government authorities, it is important to protect your systems from any form of data and vulnerability attacks. It is crucial to conduct security testing to assure that the system is secure and not susceptible to malicious activity. 

3. Improved Maintenance & Support Costs: 

Product development is never a one-time job; it is an iterative approach. It is vital to ensure that the new changes or additions have remained consistent with existing features when releasing accumulative software builds. Testing lets you understand this quickly. For example, if you have a robust test automation suite, you can combine it with your CI system for real-time feedback. The ability to recognize and fix problems before they become issues at the customer’s end is impossible without testing. As an outcome, maintenance and support costs often shoot up in such cases.

4. Poor User Experience: 

User experience is often the most neglected aspect of software products. Product features can be sold once, but user experience and comfort of use sell the product in its subsequent cycles. It is likely for the user experience to suffer without proper testing. A product or system that incorporates bugs or has usability issues can be hard to use and could result in user migration as soon as there is a similar product in the market. 

5. Poor software performance: 

In today’s era of scalable and web-based systems, it is essential that your software is optimized for good performance. In today’s fast-paced world, customers are unforgiving when it comes to page load times, image rendering, and server response times. Performance engineering and performance testing are both affected here. When software is not tested for performance and load, it may not function as expected, resulting in user dissatisfaction and reduced productivity.

Also Read: Why Do Software Bugs Occur? Types Of Defects In Software Testing

Conclusion: Adopt a Testing Approach for Your Business

Knowing the risks associated with no or low testing, you require to develop a testing strategy that aligns with your business requirements. In case you are new to testing, it is suggested that you seek the opinions of experts in this field and design a testing strategy based on your business requirements, contexts, and future goals. 

When it comes to QA, nothing is better than having the correct people in charge. That’s why we ensure everyone on our team is qualified and accredited on some of the industry’s best practices. 

At TestUnity we have an expert team of QA Engineers. This enables us to give our clients the support they require to make sure that their software hits the market in the right circumstances. Contact us for a free consultation and see why TestUnity’s QA approach is the best choice for your software.

TestUnity

Testunity is a SaaS-based technology platform driven by a vast community of testers & QAs spread around the world, powered by technology & testing experts to create the dedicated testing hub. Which is capable of providing almost all kind of testing services for almost all the platforms exists in software word.