Today we launched a new company slogan
In Tests we Trust
to promote our mission to provide sustainable software that can be maintained and developed further indefinitely. If your application is well covered by automated tests, you can easily refactor, add new features, debug and add more business value without having ever the need to start over and rewrite the software from a scratch. This leads in to huge cost savings over the application life-cycle.
Often, in many projects, we have seen that the typical half-life of an application is roughly 18 months, i.e. the time it takes before someone starts to talk about creating the version 2.0, meaning a complete rewrite of the code base. This is only a symptom of a bad software development process, and in particular lack of test automation. It means that the cost to make a change has grown greater than starting your project over. Multiply the monthly salaries of your coders by 18 months to get the cost. It is a great waste to throw away your investments every second year.
However, in PHZ.fi, we believe in test automation and sustainable software development. We have been successfully maintaining complex applications and legacy code for a decade, without having ever need to consider starting over from a scratch. Over time we have calculated over -95% application life-time cost savings compared to more traditional projects.
When our automated test cases show green, we can get a good night’s sleep.