It’s very easy to miss the hidden costs for software testing tools. Yes there’s a price on the license for the product you want to purchase but have you thought carefully about all of the hidden costs?
The most obvious hidden cost is training. Yes the vendor you purchase from will point you in the direction of training courses and clearly state the price of these training courses. Just because you’ve been on a training course though doesn’t mean you know what you are doing. It’s like passing your driving test and then spending years building experience. The training course will teach you how to use the tool but only time and effort will provide you with the experience you need to become really productive.
There’s also the temptation to skip any training. How many of us are guilty of just ignoring what’s on offer and assume we can learn the package in our own time without the need for any training? Many of us do this because we know the cost of training will add significantly to the purchase price. If the purchase price goes up then the chance of the purchase being signed off is less likely. So we forgo the training thinking that we’ll work it out ourselves anyway. More often than not this is false economy. Four or five days of training usually results in a saving of 4 times that in wasted time working things out for ourselves. Productivity goes up significantly after training and the likely-hood of a successful test tool implementation goes up significantly too.
It’s not difficult to quantify the benefits of purchasing training. It is time consuming to add that information to a well constructed software testing tools business case. It’s always worth investing that time.
One of the other important hidden costs is infrastructure. Quite often tool vendors won’t quote the cost of supporting applications in the headline price for the product. For example many software testing tools require a back end database and the tool vendor conveniently forgets to mention the cost of this in the headline price of the product. Granted for many companies they’ll already have site wide licenses for the databases back end but for many companies they won’t. The associated purchase price can be significant.
Integration is the other area that is forgotten about all together. Rarely these days does a software application exist in a vacuum all on it’s own. With many other business applications already implemented it’s more common to want, or even need, some degree of integration with existing systems that the software test team uses. Whilst you might have the in house knowledge and resources relating to your existing systems it’s likely you’ll need to bring in expertise for any new tool your purchasing. Specify your exact requirements for integration at the start to avoid any unpleasant surprises after you’ve completed the implementation of a new software testing tool.
The other game the software test tool vendors tend to play is putting many of the features you need in a higher priced edition of the product. So whilst the headline purchase price might look within your budget the price you really need to pay, for the feature set you need, is significantly higher. Be sure to question the vendor in detail about specifics during a product demo.
Lastly, the other charge that many teams forget about is the cost of peoples time to implement the tool successfully. The cost of software testing tools are usually insignificant compared to the staff costs. When you factor in the cost of having many members of your team implementing, learning and getting started with a new tool the cost can take on a whole new dimension.
Even if you can’t estimate all of these points accurately, a rough estimate will give you a completely different perspective on the purchase price. In short make sure you list and estimate all of these hidden software testing tool costs right from the start.