Testing. A vital step in your software cycle that can make or break your software product: too much and you’re bogging down the process with cost. Too little and you risk end-user functionality and quality. Does your system work? Does it provide the user experience and hit the end-user requirements it was intended to?
Your software testing cycle is an unavoidable step, so let’s speed up the process and get your product to market quicker.
Why is Speed to Market Crucial for Enterprise Software Companies?
When it comes to enterprise software development, time is money. Unfortunately, our industry tends to treat delivery dates as optional . . . making development more like horseshoes and less like archery – close is good enough, and hitting a bullseye is rare.
Cobbling code together from disparate sources, libraries, and frameworks requires a lot of testing to ensure that elements will fit together in the way you expect and result in the application you need. More often than not, the result may work, but look under the covers and you’ll find a tangled mess of spaghetti code. The more inconsistent or tangled up the code is, the more time it takes to test, debug, and QA it all.
In addition to cobbled-together code, most traditional software development still relies on manual testing, debugging, and QA. Manual testing processes are inefficient and do not help you beat your competition to market before the market moves on without you.
Speed to market is of paramount importance for enterprise software companies that need to:
- Deliver promised features to keep customers happy.
- Win against the competition in terms of features, stability, and user experience.
- Expand into new markets, or new verticals in your market to earn the revenue needed to grow and scale your business.
5 Ways to Speed Up Your Software Testing Cycle
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Use the Right Prebuilt Components
Leverage bulletproof, updated, prebuilt components as often as possible. Source these components from a reliable PaaS or from as few suppliers as possible! Prebuilt components are pretested, which means they can facilitate automation and help your current team work more efficiently. For example, PlatformPlus® is a future-proof PaaS that provides developers with prebuilt components that are automatically integrated, updated, and deployed to your app by the source.
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Leverage Automation Wisely
It’s easier to stay organized when using the best automation practices. Your goal should be to automate as much of the software development cycle as is practical. While 100% automation is neither feasible nor advisable when it comes to the entire development cycle, the software testing cycle is uniquely suited for automation – anything from unit testing to regression and QA testing can be done by the system so that your developers can focus on the problems that require human creativity to solve. Automation frees up time for your developers and allows for faster, more accurate deployment.
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Take a Modular Approach
Adopting a modular approach allows you to reuse components and drive down costs by doing so. Modular components can be reconfigured, repurposed, and reused as needed, depending on your needs and the needs of your customer. If designed and built carefully, these components only need to be tested once, and when complete, provide the same benefits as prebuilt components you may have purchased – they’re ready to go, saving time and money in the software development process.
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Focus on Communication
Communication is important, not just within the development team, but between development and other departments. You aren’t building within a silo, so keep in mind that business leaders, executive leadership, and the software development and QA teams need to work together to nail business objectives, set appropriate milestones, and get your product over the line. Create a strategic product roadmap with input from every stakeholder, from the C-suite to the lead developer, and follow that roadmap to the promised land.
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Support Your Team
Get your team’s buy-in on streamlining processes to speed up the software testing cycle, and avoid burning out your developers. It isn’t worth killing morale simply to get products to market faster. Once your developers understand the most important elements of a streamlined development process and how it aligns with business goals, they can better understand the timelines, expectations, and their part in the process.
Remember that your dev team wants to hit a bullseye for you. Show them the business and financial impact to your business – they’ll get it, sharpen their focus, and give you fewer excuses for not hitting the mark.
How Long Does Testing Take Traditionally vs. With PlatformPlus®?
Building complex commercial software products with traditional software development techniques is slow. In fact, you can expect to spend up to 50% of your time and budget to be spent in QA and break/fix.
When you develop with a bulletproof PaaS like PlatformPlus®, you can expect 80-90% fewer defects in the code and much shorter break/fix cycles for issues that do arise. Using a PaaS with prebuilt, pretested code components, inherently modular and proven architecture, and powerful code automation tools, you’ll sail through development and QA with a speed that traditional methods can’t even approach.
Remember that it’s always faster to build the quality into your software product than it is to try to test out the defects in your source code. Automation frees your developers from the boring and error-prone stuff so they can focus on the creative, problem-solving, value-adding tasks they (and your customers) actually care about.
Best of all, your product hits the market much faster (as little as 90 days) and with much higher initial quality.
How Can Leadership and Support Speed Up Testing?
The relationship between business leadership and software development is a two-way street. It all starts with having a clear and effective product roadmap. The product roadmap outlines the features, functions, milestones, and your team’s capabilities; and, because everyone – from sales to developers to customer support – is involved in the roadmap process, everyone knows what they’re responsible for and when deliverables are due.
While the executive team can stay focused on the go-to-market strategy for new software products and features, the development team can stay on track to hit development milestones and deadlines in the software product roadmap. When dev milestones are hit, the business milestones will also be achieved.
In the middle of this process are your development department’s leaders, keeping both sides of the business informed and in step. These leaders could be your Lead Developer, Software Architect, or CTO. If you have PlatformPlus®, it’s the advisors, executives, and heavy-lift engineers at Modularis who support both your executive team and your development team through the process.
These leaders are responsible for ensuring that development and testing are being done effectively and efficiently. Leaders should provide their developers with all the tools they need to hit their deadlines, and they should be holding those developers accountable for using the tools and hitting their delivery dates.
Keep business executives and development leadership well aligned in this way to keep the entire company focused on its overarching goals. That’s how you get software that’s built right, built fast, and built to last.
Testing doesn’t have to be the step that bogs your development process down.
Speed up your software testing cycle and get your product to market faster! Increase development velocity and speed to market. You need the prebuilt components, advanced AI, model-driven automation, and mature tech leadership that comes with PlatformPlus®.