Conducting a 2014 retrospective? Consider your testing.

This post originally appeared on Tellurium's "TestTalk" blog on 31 December 2014.

The end of the year is often a chaotic time, but it’s also a great opportunity to perform a retrospective, taking a look back at how your company performed and evolved over the course of the year.

As you reflect on 2014 and make plans and predictions for 2015, consider your company’s testing.

No matter if your company has an established testing team and strategy, is just getting into testing, or doesn’t test at all, considering the value and costs of testing (or not testing) and their impact on your product and company’s performance for the year is worthwhile.

Here are some questions you can ask to help you get started:

• Did we invest in testing and quality this year? In what way? To what extent?

• How did that investment (or lack thereof) impact our application’s quality? Our customers’ experience? Our company’s financial performance? Our employees’ morale?

• Is it worth making that same investment in the coming year? Should we invest more? Should we invest less? In what areas?

Pondering these questions will undoubtedly raise others, so ponder away!

Software testing is an investment. It involves time, people, and money.

By reflecting on the costs and benefits of the way your company is currently testing, you can get a better idea of how to make the most of that investment in the coming year. Maybe that means hiring more testers. Maybe that means switching to a new software testing tool. Maybe that means implementing test automation. Maybe that means beginning to introduce testing in the first place.

When you know where you’ve come from, you can better plan to get where you’d like to go.

From all of us at Test Talk, have a safe and very happy new year. See you in 2015!

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