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 experiences—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 objective of automated testing is to achieve profitability by ensuring that your customer journeys are seamless, intuitive, and contribute to your company's revenue generation while simultaneously safeguarding your brand image.
However, it can be beneficial to gain a more precise understanding of how automated QA testing can generate savings and the extent of their positive impact on your revenue.
In this article, we explore the tangible and undeniable benefits of automated testing by leveraging data from a national survey to demonstrate how bug-free websites and applications enhance business profitability.
Bugs in Web Journeys – A Decisive Purchasing Factor
Even with an offering that perfectly meets needs at a competitive price, it is already challenging enough to convince potential customers to trust you.
And according to our statistics, bugs further exacerbate challenges for businesses:
After surveying over 14,800 internet users to better understand their reactions to bugs on e-commerce websites, we observed that the presence of bugs on a website prompted 86% of French consumers to abandon a purchase.
It is therefore evident that bugs result in a lost customer in the vast majority of cases. Essentially, they lead to a loss of trust in a brand.
A particularly interesting finding is that bugs have a more pronounced impact on female users. Indeed, 41% of women report losing trust in a buggy website (compared to 9% of men).
If the web journey itself is not even functional, what does that convey about the product or service in the eyes of internet users?
The Most Detrimental Bugs for Conversion
Among all potential issues, some are inherently more disruptive than others, prompting prospective customers to seek alternatives.
Ranking of Bugs with the Most Significant Impact on Revenue:
- Payment-related errors (67%)
- Products displayed as available but out of stock (64%)
- Empty 404 and 500 error pages (50%)
- Non-functional delivery methods (49%)
- Customer account login issues (47%)
- Inability to add a product to the cart (37%)
- Mobile application malfunction (32%)
- Inconsistent product pricing before payment (28%)
- Inactive buttons (22%)
- Emptying shopping cart (19%)
- Bugs related to on-site advertisements (18%)
An Increase in Bugs Post-COVID?
The survey also revealed that since the onset of COVID-19, 51% of French consumers perceive an increasing number of bugs on e-commerce websites.
However, as with any study, the broader context must also be considered. It is plausible that such a prevalence of bugs has always existed, and COVID-19 simply led French consumers to become more aware of them by shopping online more frequently.
Consequently, these bugs have become glaringly obvious to new consumers, and have caused even greater damage.
The Cost of Production Bugs
According to Gartner analyst Andrew Lerner, the average cost of a bug rendering a system inoperable is 5,600 euros per minute of downtime.
More insightful than the average value is the range provided by the analyst, which spans from 140,000 euros per hour of downtime up to 540,000 euros.
Evidently, the cost of a production bug can vary significantly based on several factors, including:
- The nature of the bug
- The extent of its impact
- The speed of its detection and correction
- The consequences it entails.
Additional factors that may escalate the cost of a production bug
Downtime
Should the bug cause a complete system outage or the failure of a critical functionality, it can lead to significant revenue loss.
Costs may encompass lost sales, transactions, or dissatisfied users.
Emergency Fixes
If the bug necessitates an immediate correction, this can incur additional costs associated with resource mobilization to resolve the issue promptly, such as overtime, the engagement of experienced developers, or the hiring of external consultants.
Loss of Trust
As previously discussed in this article, production bugs can damage a company's reputation and customer trust, potentially leading to a loss of existing clients, challenges in acquiring new ones, and public relations management costs to mitigate the damage.
Data Loss
A bug can result in data loss or corruption, and recovering this data can be costly. This may necessitate the involvement of data recovery specialists or the engagement of external services to retrieve lost information.
Overwhelmed Customer Support
Bugs can lead to an increase in customer support requests, requiring additional resources to address reported issues, provide technical assistance, and resolve problems for affected users.
Extensive Damage Remediation
Once the bug is rectified, it may also be necessary to conduct additional testing, repair the damage caused by the bug(s), and update affected systems or data.
Prevention Over Cure
Cost of Bug Discovery Based on Detection Stage:
- Design 1X
- Implementation 6.5X
- Testing 15X
- Maintenance 100X
It is therefore paramount to establish robust organization throughout the development cycle, up to deployment, to prevent compromising situations caused by bugs.
Fundamental Preventive Tips
Adopt an Agile Approach
The Agile approach fosters close collaboration among development, testing, and operations teams, thereby facilitating the rapid and consistent delivery of quality features while adapting to changes in project requirements.
Conduct comprehensive testing
Perform QA testing at all stages of the development lifecycle.
This includes:
- Unit testing
- Integration testing
- In-production testing
- Non-regression testing.
Automate as many tests as possible to ensure consistent and rapid execution.
Establish development and testing environments
Implement development and testing environments that accurately mirror production configurations and conditions.
This facilitates the detection of environment-specific issues prior to production deployment.
Conduct code reviews
Encourage peer code reviews to identify potential errors and issues.
This enhances code quality and enables the identification of errors before they propagate to production.
Adopt a version control system
Utilize a version control system to manage source code modifications.
These effective deployment practices, such as continuous deployment, minimize the risk of introducing bugs during deployments.
Implement continuous monitoring
Implement a continuous monitoring system to detect production issues.
This encompasses monitoring logs, system metrics, errors, and performance.
Foster post-mortems and continuous improvement
Analyze issues encountered in production and leverage this information to enhance development processes, testing, and deployment practices.
Prioritize training and documentation
Ensure that developers and operational teams are adequately trained in best practices for development, testing, and deployment.
Provide clear and up-to-date documentation to facilitate prompt understanding and resolution of issues.
By following these recommendations, and especially by automating your tests, you can significantly reduce the risk of production bugs, enhance stability, accelerate deployments, and thereby contribute to optimizing ROI.
Another notable benefit is that your teams will be able to focus on new features and allocate their time to higher-value tasks.
The grim truth about test automation?
Ultimately, a bug-free web journey, achieved through test automation, does not merely increase your revenue; it safeguards it and prevents inevitably lost opportunities on a large scale.
As Aristotle stated: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” → Starting with testing!
Do you wish to calculate the ROI of your future tests?
At Mr Suricate, we’ve 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 wish to calculate your ROI to ascertain how effectively you can leverage your automated tests for profitability, we will assist you in this process by providing a free estimate.
FAQ
An Increase in Bugs Post-COVID?
The survey also revealed that since the onset of Covid, 51% of French consumers perceive an increasing number of bugs on e-commerce websites. However, as with any study, the broader context must also be considered!
What are some additional factors that can escalate the cost of a production bug?
Downtime: Should a bug lead to a complete system outage or the failure of a critical functionality, it can result in substantial revenue loss. Associated costs may encompass lost sales, transactions, or user dissatisfaction.
The grim truth about test automation?
Ultimately, while a bug-free web journey, facilitated by test automation, may not directly increase your revenue, it undeniably safeguards it and mitigates the large-scale loss of critical opportunities. As Aristotle wisely observed: 'We are what we repeatedly do.'
Further Reading
See also: Green IT: The Best Solutions for Reducing the Digital Footprint, The Page Object Pattern: A Structured Approach to Automated Testing with Mr Suricate, What Are the New Trends in B2B Online Purchasing? (FEVAD Study), and Webinar Recap | Green IT & RGESN: What Are the Impacts of Automation? ft. K-LAGAN.
Take it a step further: Calculate the ROI of your automated tests.
