The story of how testers helped a retailer increase turnover
Hi! My name is Eugene Ponomarenko, and I am the founder of an outsourcing testing and QA agency «KVCHK». Having over 16 years of experience in the industry, I have repeatedly come across the same opinion: testing and testers are necessary for development, but not for business — it does not have much to do with business processes. However, this is not true. Testing and QA are still closer to business, even though they are considered a part of IT.
How can testing help businesses and even affect their revenues? In this article, I am going to discuss it. I will also provide some simple but very illustrative cases of how testing works and why it’s all about business.
One common story in which business benefits from testing is through processes. It is the QA specialist who can skillfully establish software development processes, which can reduce bugs and critical errors that affect the business. For example, one hour of a non-functional payment form can cost a shop a considerable amount. And it may not work because, for instance, a task was lost in poorly configured processes during the development stage of the online store. Or the store could collapse due to the influx of buyers because the load testing was not done.
This is why it is essential for a team of testers with strong background and understanding of how critical functions should work in online stores, what has to be rechecked first, and when it is essential to perform load testing, among other things. One of our frequent but very informative examples is the case where we set up processes in a client’s product team, and the number of support requests decreased five times. It is not magic, but because tasks no longer get lost, people understand when and what they should do, and deadlines become more precise.
Here is one of our cases and a vivid example of why it is crucial to have an experienced testing team on your project.
Case 1
We came to a client who already had a testing team, but they were not producing significant results, missing errors or taking too long to test tasks. We entered the project as a team consisting of a lead and a tester. We quickly found out that the task description consisted only of headers; there was no communication between testers, developers, and the owner; automated tests were not being used for their intended purpose.
What we did: we trained the testing team on the necessary skills and software, reworked the automated tests to check the business functionality rather than pretty forms, and improved communication between the teams.
What this gave the client: features began to be delivered faster and without critical errors. Customers started buying 3.5 times more because the critical functionality was always working, DevOps stopped constantly increasing the server requirements, and developers started resting on weekends instead of fixing critical bugs in production.
What we got: an interesting case where the owner’s interest in our team increased, and they started dedicating more time to us; we strengthened the QA team and expanded our presence on the project with another tester.
The second common story concerns user convenience and direct users. Besides how convenient it is for the buyer to use the product, it is also essential that no element of it repels them from making a purchase. We even had a case when, after the release, customers did not want to switch to the new website section. After testing, we realized that it was very simple — the button was poorly visible. As we changed it, traffic immediately increased. Yes, a trifle. But as they say, the devil is in the details.
Case 2
A client came to us with a problem of low conversion rates. Despite high traffic, there were no purchases. After conducting a site analysis a few days later, we noticed that customers who placed orders from a certain city would enter their state as it was marked with a required asterisk, but did not verify that the state field disappeared upon form submission, causing all order information to be lost. Essentially, an empty order was being sent to the server. When we fixed this bug, 30% of lost orders were recovered.
As testers, we have the capability to determine the reason for an internet store’s high traffic, but low purchases, and what might be causing it. We can analyze various metrics such as where people land on the site, why they came, what catches their attention, etc. We will identify areas where customers are most likely to be leaving the site so that the issue can be addressed.
We fully take on all quality assurance tasks, not just identifying bugs, but also analyzing user-friendliness and checking for errors that can lead to poor traffic.
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