From the original EuroSTAR 2002 Keynote abstract:
The value of testing is a difficult thing for a tester to define – as a supplier we are not independent! It might help if we think like marketers for a moment and view testing as a service (or product?) provided by a supplier to its customers. Would that help? Maybe if we think a little more like marketers we can enhance not only the value of our testing, but also of our customers’ perception of it?
Who are the customers that benefit from our testing efforts? The sponsors of a development project, the business users, project management, development staff and others are all our customers in (sometimes) different ways. What do they VALUE in testing?
We must understand our product too. Where does the value actually get ADDED? Running a test has little value if it isn’t repeatable or we don’t remember which tests pass and fail. Perhaps it is not doing testing but the information we generate that matters? Are test results the only product of value?
Our product (or is it a service?) comes in different flavours: static and dynamic, functional and non-functional, planned and exploratory, manual and automated testing are sometimes alternatives, sometimes complementary. Are we confusing our customers by offering such diversity in the market?
This talk looks at the value of testing through the eyes of a marketer and offers some insights to how we might better brand, market and deliver test to our markets.
3 Key Points
* How do we measure the value of testing?
* What we need to change to add value to our testing.
* How we can improve our customers’ perception of the value of testing?