As important as it is to look forward – to things like generative AI, coding assistants, and more – it’s just as important to reflect on topics and tensions that continue to affect software companies across industries.
On a recent episode of Sauce Labs’ podcast, Test Case Scenario, an issue that’s haunted the software world for decades reared its head again: the divide between software quality and business value. On one side, we have developers and testers telling business leaders that quality is worth investing in; on the other side, we have business leaders making tough decisions about what to do with scarce resources.
“Sometimes it's difficult to get technical folks to understand why it's important for them to embrace the business side of things,” said Marcus Merrell, Principal Technical Advisor at Sauce Labs.
Embracing the business side is easier said than done, say Jason Baum, Senior Director of Developer Relations at Sauce Labs, and Evelyn Coleman, CSM at Salto and former Sauce Labs solutions architect.
Mind the gap
The problem of connecting quality testing to business value will remain if we don’t acknowledge that there is a problem and, more importantly, that there is a real communication gap between the technical and business sides.
On one side of the gap are developers, testers, and other technical people, who tend to think software quality is an unassailable value, that sheer quality could make the product fly off the proverbial shelves if only they were given free rein.
“Technical people tend to think that the tech will solve all the problems and that we don't need these people in the middle between us and the customers and that the product should just sell itself,” says Merrell.
But the truth is more complex, Merrell says: “It's important to understand that without sellers, you can't get your product to market. Without someone to connect you to the customer, it's not easy work.”
To clarify, Coleman brought the discussion to real-world scenarios. “It might be a little harder to make the mental jump between quality and revenue if you're working on quality for an internal tool,” she said. Internal tools certainly have value – teams wouldn’t request and use them if they didn’t – but they can’t, by definition, drive revenue or boost conversion rates the way other features can. That’s why It's a little bit more obvious when we talk retail and business-to-business. Here, we can find more explicit stories of how quality can connect to business value.”
If you’re a consumer retail outlet, cart checkout flow is a number one priority (if not number zero). Similarly, as Coleman says, there can’t be lag if you’re checking your accounts: “It just needs to be accurate every single day every time you open up the app.”
Any issues here flow right down to users who have strict expectations. “If I open my bank app, and I'm a consumer,” Baum says, “And my bank account is zero when I know it's not zero – I'll be pretty mad.”
But that strictness doesn’t apply to every feature. Coleman explains that if the language on a page is a little bit off, that doesn’t present nearly the same level of urgency as even some minor lag.
Similarly, with a hypothetical health insurance software company, priorities differ. Open enrollment, for example, means there will be spikes in usage. As a result, Coleman says, “There's going to be a big push for changes right before open enrollment and maybe even a freeze before then.”
At that point, she says, it’s not even about the types of tests you’re running, but about “The rhythm of your software development life cycle and the rhythm of quality – making sure that you freeze things in time, but take into account the time for testing in your quality strategy rather than just the time for development.”
Ultimately, as Merrell says, “It's going to be sort of different for every team and product.”
Building bridges
Understanding the gap between the technical side and the business side is a necessary precondition to success, but building the bridge between the two requires talking directly to your team and to adjacent teams to understand their needs and priorities.
“That's how the tester can orient themselves towards the business,” Merrell says. “Talking to salespeople and marketing folks at kickoffs and annual meetings is one of the most critical things because you start to question your own assumptions about what areas of the product are most critical to most customers.”
Coleman explains that the first few months of the year are especially pivotal for these discussions. “This is exactly the time of year to have these conversations and to get in the room, to raise your hand, to ask, ‘What are the top five things that drive revenue in our app? In our business? In our product?’”
But that’s just the start. Dig deeper by comparing apps and features, playing out happy and unhappy paths, and discussing how priorities shift across real-world scenarios. “Dig a little deeper than just asking, ‘How do we make money off of our product?’” Coleman says. “Ask how you can support that with quality.”
Building these bridges and understanding how priorities feel across teams is essential partially because the technical side is liable to conflate priorities if they don’t know better. “Folks in tech tend to treat all bugs and all features with an equal weight,” Merrell says. However, he continues, “As an engineer, it's really important to understand why it is so critical to make sure that the fundamental nugget of the transaction can always work.”
Of course, the confusion is just as likely to come from the business side. Folks in sales, for example, often don’t understand the granular distinctions between unit testing and integration testing – and how it can affect user experience. But that means both sides need to work on building the bridge and meeting in the middle.
“It’s all about getting engineering to understand that not everything is equal and some things are far more important than others, and then getting sales to be confident that you are always focused on those things, even if you may not be working on them right now,” Merrell says. “The empathy has to go both ways.”
Maintaining bridges
A bridge can only be crossed as long as it’s maintained, and this is where many teams get disrupted. After a great kickoff call to drive an important project, everyone might start working in alignment, but as time goes on, old habits creep up, the bridge falls into disrepair, and the teams are back where they started.
To keep the bridge functional, Merrell explains, teams need to go beyond the immediate problems in a given project to understand the minds and motivation behind what drives people's actions.
Merrell returns to a mental exercise that proves reliably helpful: “If I put myself in the mind of the CEO reporting to shareholders, what does he care about?”
In B2C, that often meant revenue growth, but the priorities and the strategies supporting them can differ across companies, industries, and verticals.
The more you do this over time, the more trust you can build. Early on, the technical side can consider it annoying, if not a total distraction, to put so much time and effort into understanding the business side and explaining how its priorities fit into theirs. But it’s an investment, and it pays off.
“You only get that drilling down from the business side if they don't think you're on top of stuff,” Merrell says. “If you have a history of delivering a product that is the right product at the right time, then, if you have a mishap, they'll tend to believe you that when you say you're on top of it.”
The confidence, proven in early and transparent communication builds the bridge, but dismissive, vague answers risk degrading it. “If you answer with ‘It depends’ or a lot of equivocating or a lot of dancing around the issue, then they'll start to ask more and more questions, and they'll ask for details to measure your confidence,” Merrell says. “And that'll only happen if they are not confident that you are on top of things.”
“The one thing to understand about the business mindset,” Merrell says, “is that people tend to trust each other if the history has been good.”
Takeaways
The conversation about the gap between the technical side and the business side is long-standing, but that doesn’t mean crossing the gap is impossible – it means crossing the gap can provide your company disproportionate value because others still struggle with it.
The better both sides can communicate and maintain healthy communication habits, the better they can move in concert and without friction. The two sides need each other, and when they’re in sync, the results exceed the sum of their parts.
