Convincing anyone that testing is essential to the success of any organization is pointless. I assume that every leader understands the importance of the production system and how any error impacts the business. To simply put it, every mistake ends up in costs for the loss of the sales of the goods.
That is why companies invest into manual or automation testers along with testing tools that flood the market.
To communicate anything to anybody we need to first understand who the stakeholders are and what their pain points are. Yes cliche, one would say, and an obvious answer in every company would be: company’s money, goals, leader’s money, company’s reputation, etc.
And here empathy comes in. Imagine that your stakeholders care about the points mentioned above. They are flooded with testers, proposed to tons of tools in the market and exhausted from the idea of even testing due to prior inefficient experiences.
As you right now can imagine such communication is not going to be an easy task.
Numbers
First, in any business communication it is essential to show the numbers. Sometimes it takes time to gather them, but it is worth it. You will ask which numbers? The ones that make your company lose money and you and your company do not want that, right. Some companies such as Int4 offer ready made calculators which can be easily used and will provide you with the numbers needed.
Data
With the plethora of KPIs that a company operates on it is difficult to decide which information would be the most crucial one to be presented to the board of directors, CTO, CFO for them to see the benefit in a testing solution to be implemented.
So, if you wanted to convince anybody that testing automation would benefit your company you would need to account for Manual Testing Cost Estimation. Check how many interfaces are being tested then take the average number of test cases per interface and finally what is the time effort per interface test case execution.
We should not forget about the labor aspect. Labor cost estimation would be the key factor when making a decision by your stakeholder. The number of full cycles of regression testing within one year and the average cost of IT professionals per day would give you a breaking point decision factor whether to decide on an automating solution or stick to your IT team that could support your company in more challenging areas of your business.
Case Studies
If the company that provides a testing solution has case studies available on their website like Int4’s Glencore Case Study e.g., do not hesitate to present them as well. Recommendations give credibility to the solution presented for sure. Moreover, if your solution is being advocated by a Swiss multinational commodity trading and mining company with headquarters in Baar, Switzerland you should be self- assured already that it is not a waste of time to present such a solution to your team.
So, how to effectively communicate the value of testing inside your organization? Stick to the numbers, shown by applicable data and the value proved by the current customers who are already benefiting from the solution.
