The ROI of Software Testing

A recent internal e-mail (thanks, Ian!) included links to these two reports on the ROI of software testing, which may be beneficial to anyone seeking to justify software testers and tools.

Speaking of the value of software testing, I’d like to issue an appeal to the professional software testers who may read this blog. If you aren’t a software tester, but you know one, please forward this to him or her.

This is an opportunity for you to have a profound impact on Team System’s testing tools. Steven Clarke, a usability engineer working on Team System, is seeking software testers and test leads to volunteer for a study we’re doing on how you do what you do. The way it works, a couple people from Microsoft come to your workplace and observe how you work. The goal of the study is to better understand what we need to do to improve our product for future releases.

The reality is that such studies are expensive to run, so you can trust that information learned is highly valued. That said, we must unfortunately limit our on-site visits to the United States, and preferably, to the Pacific Northwest. While we appreciate the opportunity to visit someplace like Sydney, Cairo or some other exciting part of the world, travel budgets are limited.

If you’re interested, see this post (Help us learn how you work) on Steven’s blog and tell him that you’d like to participate in the study.

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