So here's a question: what would it take for a software product marketing team to advertise that fact that it was tested by its test team?  In other words, how could a test team add enough value to a product that it was one of the major reasons to buy that product (and that reason was so compelling and understandable that it would make a difference in sales if customers knew about it)? [ronpih I guess...]

My thoughts:

The answer is "Find customers who will pay for it."

Testing is a service, not a feature. It is a way to measure risk regarding the performance of the product, but it is not the only way to measure such risk.

At one end of the spectrum, a company could release a product, having done little or no testing on it. They then could fix bugs found in the field, and keep releasing new versions with the bug fixes.

Eventually, the measured risk of undiscovered, serious bugs in the product would be very low, due to the extensive field use and fix cycles completed.

But the company probably could not charge very much for the product at first. And by the time the product stabilized and the confidence level was high enough, other companies that chose to do more in-house testing would likely have new features ready, developed during the time saved by not having so many fix-release cycles.

At the other end of the spectrum . . .

Medical devices (and software for medical devices) must undergo regulated testing.

Telecom equipment, especially stuff that gets mounted in the central offices, must meet BellCore standards for testing (and development methodologies, and documentation, and a bunch of other stuff).

In both these cases, the immediate customer was willing to pay for the extra testing, because the combination of money saved by avoiding the cost of failures, and the amount of the up-front cost they were able to pass on down to the ultimate customers, more than covered the cost of the testing.

Testing provides information about risk - it does not in and of itself make the product better. If your customers are willing (or allowed, by the market) to pay (in time and money) for reduced risk, then you can do more testing.

  2:35:01 PM