Why worry about software quality?

Bob hates his business software package! Why does he hate it? Well, between the constant bugs his team has to work around, the dismally slow performance, and the fact that every update changes their default settings, he's had it. If all that wasn't enough, at the end of last week the entire system went down for four hours and cost him several thousand dollars in lost revenue. This morning their latest update had once again reset his custom defaults and his team had spent 2 hours getting the system back to where they could use it again. This was pretty much the last straw for Bob. He hopped on their competitors website and filled out the sales contact form.

Bob's story isn't that unusual. You’ve probably seen the statistics, software bugs cost the worldwide economy over $1,100,000,000,000 annually (numbers from 2016). more than 4.4 billion customers were affected due to serious issues that could have and should have been caught before getting released. It’s also well established that fixing software bugs early in the development process can be as much as 100 times cheaper than fixing them in production. In spite of these known costs, so many companies still struggle with software quality.

Part of the problem is that many companies still see improving software quality as a cost, instead of an increasing revenue center. Here’s some numbers that may be surprising

- 70% of customers say they are willing to pay more for a company that offers a superior experience
- Increasing customer retention by 5% increases profits by at least 25% and can be as high as 95%
- It is anywhere from 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to keep existing ones.
- Customers are becoming less tolerant of buggy software. A recent Tech Beacon survey indicates as high as 80% of users will change software due to quality issues.

While increasing quality may seem like a cost initially, the long term benefits far outweigh the short-term costs.

What makes HillCity Technologies different

We know that there is great ROI from improving quality!

We've done the research and looked at that the numbers. Fixing bugs earlier in the process can decrease your cost significantly. It only makes sense, if a developer can fix the bug while it's still fresh in their minds it will take far less time than if they have to dig back into work they did weeks or even months ago. Add to that, higher quality software results in better customer retention. Higher customer retention improves profitiability significantly. Happy customers also tend to tell their unhappy friends who are still using your competitors software, resulting in easier and increased sales.

We look at everything!

At HillCity Technologies we recognize that creating quality software isn’t just a function of the QA or test department. Creating quality software takes a team effort and for that reason we look at all of your processes from Sales to Release. We look not just for the surface issues like production bugs, we drill down in to find the root cause of your quality challenges. Whether it’s a Sales process that promises more than the team can deliver, a development process that shortcuts QA/Testing, or a Release process that does not provide rigorous enough checks, we’ll find it and help you address it.

We love simple solutions!

We recognize that having too many processes, or processes that are too intensive, can be just as damaging as a lack of process. When we find the root cause we’ll help you design the simplest solution possible. We want our solutions to be just rigorous enough to address the issues, but also lightweight enough that it doesn’t disrupt the rhythm of your company.

We create strategies for Sustainable Change!

Change is hard for any organization and we recognize that addressing quality issues won’t necessarily be a popular decision. That’s why we look for the “quick wins” that will involve the least amount of change with the most benefit so that it builds momentum towards quality engineering. We also design solutions that will move your quality initiatives forward in small pieces. We like to call it Sustainable Change.