If you don’t already have a thorough testing process which is incorporated into your budgeting for project estimates, I’d like to convince you why you need to! Testing can slip onto the last item on our lists as developers, for a number of reasons. Not least of which is that it’s not the most glamorous piece of the development process. It’s also tedious, and doesn’t feel very rewarding.

However, it is an invaluable piece of the project. And you need to budget for it as well. Once you’ve come up with your project estimate based on your best guess of how long it will take to accomplish all the features (including a little extra padding for the “oh crap” factor), then you want to take that number and slap an additional 20% to 30% on top of it for testing. It hurts to add that onto the budget, for you because you’re concerned the client won’t bite, and for the client because…well, they don’t want to pay for it.

So now that you’ve accounted for it in your budget and you’re talking to your client, they are now drilling down into your estimate and trying to isolate pieces of the budget that they might be able to remove. If they even start thinking about trying to cut the testing budget, you want to raise a huge red flag, wave your hands in the air, and do a little dance. You have to hold the line on this, and communicate to the client that testing is a critical and integral part of building a reliable, solid web app. Soon they will grow to trust your judgement.

One tool that I noticed recently which I’d like to point out, while we’re on this topic, is a company like Cenzic who you can actualy outsource your testing too. Now they are an enterprise-level solution, so you might not actually need that much fire power. But consider the possibility of outsourcing your testing. Testing is a skill in and of itself, and it can be difficult to put yourself in the mindset of a tester when you are a developer. Did I just say difficult? That is a massive understatement!

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