For the benefit of those less ‘Techy’, DevOps is a set of practices combining software development with IT operations. It aims to shorten the software development lifecycle, making it faster to develop and deliver new digital solutions.
Downtime is extremely expensive. Every moment your company can’t operate creates a risk of lost connections, contracts, partnerships, and other valuable aspects of doing business.
Test automation creates a tighter feedback loop between the development of the code and the testing process. As a result, it takes less time to identify and resolve bugs.I think we can all agree that there are some benefits that are impossible to put a price tag on.
Here are some of the “soft” benefits that clients speak of when they implement WinfoTest.
Opportunity Cost: This is the cost of pulling your key resources off other critical tasks to help with testing. We heard from one customer who had a resourcing challenge around Black Friday, one of their busiest times of the year. They had to pull staff from the day-to-day order processing to help with testing a quarterly update from Oracle. This had a direct impact on sales and very disruptive for the team.
Staff Motivation: Let’s face it, sometimes manually executing the same tasks over and over can be a little repetitive and can demotivate employees. We get it – you would prefer them to engage on higher level work. The good news is that our software robot (WinfoTest) is happy to execute countless test scripts, emulating a real user and report back on any bugs it encounters. It is also happy to run 24/7 without any breaks 🙂
Reducing Risk: It is really hard to put a value on this but the biggest concern for any ERP support manager is the potential for major business disruptions caused by bugs not caught during testing. For many companies the system is the beating heart of operations so having it go down is not an option. Hershey’s famously lost $100 million in sales due to insufficient ERP post-implementation testing so no-one wants a repeat of that!
Upgrading to automated testing is about more than just money and time savings. It’s also about seizing the opportunity to modernise your business by leveraging productivity gains and freeing people to focus on higher-level activities.
New efficiencies come with these new cloud applications, helping your organisation stay current with software, security, and technology. Instead of staying bogged down with manual testing, your team can readjust their focus to high-value activities and other in-demand projects that have languished without attention under the manual model.
