The aim of automated testing is to make it profitable by ensuring that your customer journeys are smooth and intuitive, and that they facilitate your company's sales while protecting your brand image.
However, it can be useful to have a more accurate idea of how automated QA testing can save you money, and how much of a positive impact it will have on your bottom line.
In this article, we explore the concrete and indisputable benefits of automated testing , using figures from a national survey to show how bug-free websites and applications improve business profitability.
Bugs on web paths - a decisive factor in purchasing
Even with an offer that perfectly meets your needs at a competitive price, it' s hard enough to convince your potential customers to trust you.
And according to our statistics, bugs complicate business life even more:
After surveying over 14,800 Internet users to find out more about their reactions to bugs on merchant sites, we found that the presence of bugs on a site prompted 86% of French people to abandon a purchase.
It's quite obvious, then, that bugs mean one less customer in the vast majority of cases. Essentially, they lead to a loss of trust in a brand.
A particularly interesting finding is that bugs have a greater impact on women. Indeed, 41% of women say they lose confidence in a site that bugs (versus 9% of men).
If the web path isn't even functional, what does that say about the product or service in the eyes of web users?
The most disastrous conversion bugs
Of all the possible problems, some are more disruptive than others, prompting potential customers to look elsewhere.
The ranking of bugs with the greatest impact on sales:
- Payment-related errors (67%)
- Products unavailable in stock but displayed as available (64%)
- Empty 404 and 500 error pages (50%)
- Delivery methods that don't work (49%)
- Problems logging on to your customer account (47%)
- Inability to add a product to the basket (37%)
- Application not working on your mobile (32%)
- Product price inconsistency prior to payment (28%)
- Inactive buttons (22%)
- Empty basket (19%)
- Site advertising bugs (18%)
More bugs after Covid?
The survey also revealed that since covid, 51% of French people find that e-commerce sites have more and more bugs.
However, as with any study, you also have to take the whole context into account! There is the possibility that so many bugs have always existed, and covid has simply caused the French to realize this by buying online more often.
As a result, these bugs became painfully obvious to new consumers, and caused even more damage.
The cost of the bug in production
According to Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner, the average cost of a bug that renders a system inoperable is 5,600 euros per minute of downtime.
More interesting than the average value is the range proposed by the analyst, which is between 140,000 euros per hour of downtime and up to 540,000 euros.
Of course, the cost of a bug in production can vary considerably depending on a number of factors, such as :
- The nature of the bug
- The scale of its impact
- The speed with which it is detected and corrected
- The consequences it entails.
Here are a few elements that can also increase the cost of a bug in production
Stopping time
If the bug leads to a complete shutdown of the system or essential functionality, this can result in a significant loss of revenue.
Costs can include loss of sales, transactions or unhappy users.
Emergency corrections
If the bug requires immediate correction, this may entail additional costs associated with mobilizing resources to resolve the problem as quickly as possible, such as overtime, hiring experienced developers, or hiring external consultants.
Loss of confidence
As already mentioned in this article, production bugs can damage a company's reputation and customer confidence, leading to loss of existing customers, difficulties in acquiring new ones, and costs associated with public relations management to mitigate the damage.
Data loss
A bug can lead to data loss or damage, and data recovery can be costly. This may require the intervention of data recovery specialists or the hiring of external services to recover lost information.
Overloaded customer support
Bugs can lead to an increase in the volume of customer support requests, requiring additional resources to respond to reported problems, provide technical support and resolve issues for affected users.
In-depth damage repair
Once the bug has been corrected, it may also be necessary to carry out further tests, repair any damage caused by the bug or bugs, and update the affected systems or data.
Prevention before cure
Cost of discovering bugs based on where they are detected :
- Design 1X
- 6.5x implementation
- Testing 15x
- Maintenance 100x
So it's vital to be organized throughout the development cycle, right up to production launch, to avoid compromising situations caused by bugs.
Basic preventive tips
Adopt an agile approach
TheAgile approach fosters close collaboration between development, test and operations teams, facilitating rapid and regular delivery of quality functionality while adapting to changes in project requirements.
Perform in-depth tests
Perform QA tests at every stage of the development cycle.
This includes :
- Unit tests
- Integration testing
- Production testing
- Non-regression tests.
Automate as many tests as possible to ensure consistent and rapid execution.
Create development and test environments
Set up development and test environments that faithfully reflect production configurations and conditions.
This enables environment-specific problems to be detected before production deployment.
Perform code reviews
Encourage peer code reviews to detect errors and potential problems.
This helps to improve code quality and identify errors before they propagate into production.
Adopt a version control system
Use a version control system to manage source code modifications.
These efficient deployment practices, such as continuous deployment, minimize the risk of introducing bugs during deployment.
Continuous monitoring
Set up a continuous monitoring system to detect problems in production.
This includes monitoring logs, system metrics, errors and performance.
Encourage post-mortem and continuous improvement
Analyze problems encountered in production and use this information to improve development processes, testing and deployment practices.
Prioritize training and documentation
Ensure that developers and operational teams are properly trained in good development, testing and deployment practices.
Provide clear, up-to-date documentation to make it easier to understand and resolve problems as quickly as possible.
By following these recommendations, and above all by automating your tests, you can considerably reduce the risk of production bugs, improve stability, deploy more rapidly and thus help optimize ROI.
Another notable benefit is that your teams can focus on new functions, and use their time on higher value-added subjects.
The macabre truth about test automation?
At the end of the day, it's not that a bug-free web journey thanks to test automation increases your sales, but it does preserve them and avoids inevitably lost opportunities on a large scale.
And Aristotle said: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is therefore not an act but a habit." → Starting with testing!
Would you like to calculate the ROI of your future tests?
At Mr Suricatewe' ve saved our customers a loss of €48,000,000, and in 2022 alone, we've launched 12,000,000 executions, detected 16,800 bugs, including 5,500 blocking ones (not to mention the thousands of hours avoided dealing with false positives).
If you'd like to calculate your ROI to understand just how profitable your automated tests can be, we can help you with a free estimate.
