In a nutshell: The goal of automated testing is to maximize its return on investment by ensuring that your customer journeys are seamless, intuitive, and drive revenue for your business while protecting your brand image. This guide covers: Bugs in web journeys—a decisive factor in purchasing decisions; The most disastrous bugs for conversion; An increase in bugs after COVID-19?; Prevention is better than cure.
The goal of automated testing is to maximize its value by ensuring that your customer journeys are seamless and intuitive, and that they help drive your company’s revenue while protecting your brand image.
However, it may be helpful to have a clearer idea of how automated QA testing can save money and to what extent it will have a positive impact on your revenue.
In this article, we explore the concrete and undeniable benefits of automated testing , using data from a national survey to show how bug-free websites and apps improve business profitability.
Bugs on website navigation paths—a decisive factor in purchasing decisions
Even with an offer that perfectly meets their needs at a competitive price, it's hard enough to convince your potential customers to trust you.
And according to our statistics, bugs make life even more difficult for a company:
After surveying more than 14,800 internet users to better understand their reactions to bugs on e-commerce sites, we found that the presence of bugs on a site caused 86% of French people to abandon a purchase.
So it’s very clear that bugs result in the loss of a customer in the vast majority of cases. Essentially, they lead to a loss of trust in a brand.
One particularly interesting finding is that bugs have a greater impact on women. In fact, 41% of women say they lose confidence in a website that has bugs (compared to 9% of men).
If the website isn't even functional, what does that say about the product or service in the eyes of internet users?
The Most Disastrous Bugs for a Conversion
Of all the possible problems, some are more likely to be a source of frustration than others and prompt potential customers to look elsewhere.
Ranking of the bugs with the greatest impact on revenue:
- Payment-related errors (67%)
- Products that are out of stock but listed as available (64%)
- Blank 404 and 500 error pages (50%)
- Delivery Methods That Don't Work (49%)
- Problems logging into their customer account (47%)
- The inability to add a product to the shopping cart (37%)
- An app not working on a user's phone (32%)
- Price inconsistencies prior to payment (28%)
- Inactive buttons (22%)
- The Shrinking Shopping Cart (19%)
- Bugs related to ads on the site (18%)
An Increase in Bugs After COVID?
The survey also revealed that since the COVID-19 pandemic, 51% of French people feel that e-commerce sites have been experiencing more and more glitches.
However, as with any study, we must also take the broader context into account! It’s possible that just as many bugs have always existed, and that the pandemic simply caused the French to become more aware of them as they started shopping online more often.
As a result, these bugs became painfully obvious to new customers and caused even more damage.
The Cost of a Bug in Production
According to Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner, on average, the cost of a bug that renders a system inoperable is 5,600 euros per minute of downtime.
More interesting than the average figure is the range suggested by the analyst, which is between 140,000 euros per hour of downtime and up to 540,000 euros.
Of course, the cost of a bug in production can vary considerably depending on several factors, such as:
- The nature of the bug
- The extent of its impact
- How quickly it is detected and corrected
- The consequences it entails.
A few factors that can also increase the cost of a bug in production
Downtime
If the bug causes the system or an essential feature to shut down completely, it could result in a significant loss of revenue.
Costs may include lost sales, lost transactions, or dissatisfied users.
Emergency Corrections
If the bug requires immediate correction, this may result in additional costs associated with mobilizing resources to resolve the issue as quickly as possible, such as overtime, bringing in experienced developers, or hiring external consultants.
Loss of trust
As mentioned earlier in this article, bugs in production can damage a company’s reputation and erode customer trust, which can lead to the loss of existing customers, difficulties in acquiring new ones, and costs associated with public relations efforts to mitigate the damage.
Data Loss
A bug can result in data loss or damage, and recovering that data can be costly. It may require the assistance of data recovery specialists or the use of external services to recover the lost information.
Overwhelmed customer support
Bugs can lead to an increase in the volume of customer support requests, which requires additional resources to address reported issues, provide technical support, and resolve problems for affected users.
Repairs to Extensive Damage
Once the bug has been fixed, it may also be necessary to conduct additional testing, repair any damage caused by the bug or bugs, and update the affected systems or data.
Prevention Is Better Than Cure
Cost of bug detection based on where they are detected:
- Design 1X
- 6.5x Implementation
- Testing 15x
- Maintenance 100x
It is therefore essential to stay organized throughout the development cycle, all the way through to production, in order to avoid problematic situations caused by bugs.
Basic Preventive Tips
Adopt an agile approach
The Agile approach promotes close collaboration among development, testing, and operations teams, which facilitates the rapid and consistent delivery of high-quality features while adapting to changes in project requirements.
Conduct thorough testing
Perform QA testing at every stage of the development cycle.
This includes:
- Unit Tests
- Integration Testing
- Production Testing
- Non-regression tests.
Automate as many tests as possible to ensure consistent and fast execution.
Create development and testing environments
Set up development and test environments that accurately reflect production configurations and conditions.
This makes it possible to detect environment-specific issues before deployment to production.
Perform code reviews
Encourage peer code reviews to identify errors and potential issues.
This helps improve code quality and identify errors before they make their way into production.
Implement a version control system
Use a version control system to manage changes to the source code.
These effective deployment practices, such as continuous deployment, minimize the risk of introducing bugs during deployments.
Perform continuous monitoring
Set up a continuous monitoring system to detect production issues.
This includes monitoring logs, system metrics, errors, and performance.
Encourage post-mortems and continuous improvement
Analyze the issues encountered in production and use that information to improve development processes, testing, and deployment practices.
Prioritize training and documentation
Make sure that developers and operations teams are properly trained in best practices for development, testing, and deployment.
Provide clear and up-to-date documentation to help users understand and resolve issues as quickly as possible.
By following these recommendations—and especially by automating your tests—you can significantly reduce the risk of bugs in production, improve stability, deploy faster, and thereby help optimize ROI.
Another notable benefit: your teams will be able to focus on new features and devote their time to tasks that add greater value.
The Grim Truth About Test Automation?
Ultimately, it’s not that a bug-free user experience achieved through test automation increases your revenue, but rather that it preserves it and prevents opportunities from being inevitably lost on a large scale.
And Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” → Starting with the tests!
Would you like to calculate the ROI of your future tests?
At Mr Suricate, we have saved our clients €48,000,000 in losses, and in 2022 alone, we ran 12,000,000 test runs, detected 16,800 bugs—including 5,500 critical ones—(not to mention the thousands of hours saved by avoiding false positives).
If you'd like to calculate your ROI to understand how much you can benefit from your automated tests, we'll help you through the process by providing a free estimate.
FAQ
An Increase in Bugs After COVID?
The survey also revealed that since the COVID-19 pandemic, 51% of French people feel that e-commerce sites have been experiencing more and more glitches. However, as with any study, it’s important to consider the broader context!
What are some other factors that can also increase the cost of a bug in production?
Downtime If a bug causes a complete system outage or the failure of an essential feature, it can result in significant revenue loss. Costs may include lost sales, lost transactions, or dissatisfied users.
The Grim Truth About Test Automation?
Ultimately, it’s not that a bug-free user experience achieved through test automation increases your revenue, but rather that it preserves it and prevents opportunities from being inevitably lost on a large scale. And as Aristotle said: “We are what we repeatedly do.”