The Total Cost of Website Testing
One of the main reasons developers don’t test their websites and applications is because the initial costs are too high.
Website testing will undoubtedly influence the budget for your website’s maintenance, so it’s important to think about how to justify the cost of a website testing tool in your development process.
Monetate has put together a comprehensive and informative infographic on the challenges, costs, impact, indirect/direct costs, and opportunities that website testing can provide. In short, there’s more to the cost of testing than a tool’s price tag.
Some things to consider:
We especially appreciate the bottom line:
“A tool might be cheap, or even free, but your time and people are not.”
Even if you’re not willing to invest in a tool, you should consider whether there are any free tools that could be leveraged to make an impact.
One more tidbit of advice to chew on…
It’s also important to consider the fall out if you take shortcuts or skip testing to save money or make a deadline.
Let’s consider an extreme example like the Obamacare debacle in 2013. When the Affordable Care Act websites went live last year, they made headlines. And not for a good reason.
Healthcare.gov, and its related healthcare exchanges, experienced technical glitches galore including shutdowns, outages, mis-loaded content, rejected logins, and more.
To put it nicely, it was a national embarrassment.
Even worse?
According to Reuters, the sign-up web page failed to handle even 500 hundred users at one time in the days leading up to the launch.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the cost of building the flagship technology portion of the project cost taxpayers more than $500 million (or so calculates Digital Trends). That’s not even counting what it will cost to get this struggling beast of a website back on track. According to some reports, the bill for fixing the website could cost up to $1 billion!
The lesson: Testing is important. Skipping it or cutting corners when you’re testing could end up costing you more (a billion more!) in the long run.
What was the most important takeaway for you from Monetate’s infographic?
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