You may be thinking that forcing developers to apply rigorous testing may be too costly. Figure 1.4 shows the many techniques developers have to apply if they follow the flow I am proposing. It is true: testing software properly is more work than not doing so. Let me convince you why it is worth it:
- The cost of bugs that happen in production often outweighs the cost of prevention (as shown by Boehm and Papaccio, 1988). Think of a popular web shop and how much it would cost the shop if the payment application goes down for 30 minutes due to a bug that could have been easily prevented via testing.
- Teams that produce many bugs tend to waste time in an eternal loop where developers write bugs, customers (or dedicated QAs) find the bugs, developers fix the bugs, customers find a different set of bugs, and so on.
- Practice is key. Once developers are used to engineering test cases, they can do it much faster.