Why do I have to test the software?

As part of our process, we offer a period of Warranty whereby we ask you to test the software and really use it, try it and break it. During this period things will break and stop working and sometimes the software will become unusable. Sometimes it’s just a minor inconvenience.

We ask our clients to test the software themselves to truly know its working correctly before trusting it totally.

Sometimes our clients say, “If you tested the software then we would not have too.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. When the developer builds a feature, they test it out themselves and make sure it works as they expect, but being humans we know how the software works and how it’s supposed to work. So usually they test if it works as they expect. They also test it to make sure that things they know could go wrong are also handled. However, their testing is based on their expectations of the software and not yours.

Once we hand over the software to our clients we find they use the software in a way we didn’t expect and break our solution. It makes us sad 🙂 but we want the Client to let us know as soon as possible about how they broke it and then we can change the software to make sure that they can’t break it. Over time we will find all these little issues and fix them.

However, we also offer support so in 6 months after the warranty period you find a bug we will still fix it. You can rest assured we will be working with you to make the solution as solid as possible. 

Another thing we have found is our users will use the software in a new and creative way that we didn’t anticipate, so sometimes we need to train the user how to achieve the results they want or tweak the solution to work the way they expect. They may have come up with a better way of doing something that we didn’t think of.

It really is a collaborative process that we all work together on. Eventually, there are fewer bugs and software works really well and it will be smooth sailing.