The High Cost of Skipping Software Testing: 7 Business Risks You Can’t Ignore
Key Takeaways
- Delivering above and beyond customer expectations with improved processes and faster cycle times is the end goal for most IT-heavy organizations — moreover, industry-wide change is inevitable.
- Testing plays a crucial role in ensuring the quickest possible cycle times, with businesses leaving themselves open to big risks and steep costs. Unfortunately, many organizations leave testing until the final stage — and even then, only pay lip service.
- Proper testing can avoid some of the largest pitfalls for major projects — keeping both customers and employees happy.
All projects include a testing phase—but too often, it’s deprioritized. When testing is rushed or skipped, implementations get delayed, quality suffers, and costs rise. Worse yet, businesses risk eroding user trust and undermining their investment. In this post, we explore seven costly consequences of not properly testing your business software—and why automated testing is key to avoiding them.
Why Do We Need Automated Testing?
Organizations have always needed to adapt, but to thrive and compete in today’s cutthroat world demands resilience, slack, and quicker supply chain adjustments. Proper project planning — and testing — is the backbone of making sure organizations excel at what they do best.
When testing is deprioritized, everyone suffers: Teams, organizations, customers, and their customers all bear the brunt of poor planning. And given how increasingly crucial IT infrastructure is to a functioning society, functionality shortcuts can’t be afforded.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. Organizations that have figured out the importance of testing — throughout the whole lifecycle of a project — are thriving as a result.
Failing to properly plan and test can result in significant risk and financial losses. Ensure successful project implementation; avoid these seven drawbacks that occur when organizations fail to prioritize testing.
1. Disruptive Software Updates Without Early Testing
Every company has systems and on-prem infrastructure that they may have been using for decades. The rise of cloud is now making upgrades ever more urgent.
No longer is there the luxury of avoiding necessary updates. When the time for them does finally come — and come they shall — they’ll be that much more disruptive. Attempting to delay the inevitable doesn’t work — especially for business-critical infrastructure and systems.
As the old proverb goes, a stitch in time saves nine. Test properly today, and avoid overly disruptive updates when they can no longer be avoided.
2. Falling Behind Without Continuous Software Improvement
If organizations can count on anything (especially for SaaS), it’s change. Change is coming quicker and with greater frequency. Customer demands and expectations are rising. This means greater pressure to provide more regular updates — that function properly.
Today’s technology curve demands more frequent and rigorous testing of more updates. Organizations not releasing constant updates are at a competitive disadvantage and end up dealing with the fallout later on.
Thankfully, automated testing is less of a burden on resources than hiring a full testing team. With the right regimen in place, organizations can not just survive, but thrive.
3. Higher Business Risk from Avoiding Incremental Testing
A typical waterfall approach comes, for many, with fear of change. A company that’s had a stable implementation doesn’t want to go near change in case something goes wrong. Then routine maintenance delays become habitualized. Organizations with this mindset proudly adopt the adage, If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
However, the problem with this approach is that after five years and much delay, the system is inherently broken and it does need fixing. What could’ve been an unobtrusive patch is now a new, major project for an organization — with greater cost and risk. Aligning people and capital disrupts other ongoing projects and regular business functions.
Companies would often like to change, but are held back by risk aversion. But more incremental updates actually reduce overall risk. And if it can’t be avoided, is it not better to move ahead as soon as the need is identified?
4. Deployment Delays from Poor Test Planning
The number one bottleneck for rapid solution deployment is a badly implemented testing phase (generally at the end). More critically, organizations already know this.
The problem is that, regardless of how well-intentioned project implementation is, typical life cycles leave them until the end of the process, which ultimately delays the project overall. Pushing testing to the eleventh hour creates problems that ripple through the supply chain.
By testing earlier in the implementation cycle, defects are spotted long before the very end. Because testing is integrated as a fundamental part of the process from the very start, there’s less cleaning up at the end with project-stalling bottlenecks.
5. Costly Miscommunication Without a Testing Framework
Miscommunication is rife across industries — the largest enterprises are composed of so many organizations that it’s often unavoidable.
Sometimes, the actual implementation of the changes is what highlights miscommunication and assumptions plaguing project implementation. Avoiding changes and testing creates a higher risk for more miscommunication and assumptions.
Reducing miscommunication and assumptions earlier in the process with automated testing — using a commonly understood framework — significantly minimizes cost.
Not testing in this way (or at all) has the reverse effect, and there’s far more room for project fragmentation and delay.
6. Slower User Feedback Without Automated Testing
If implementing changes gives quicker user feedback for further improvement, complacency or procrastination on this means more critical system changes, additional requirements, and a greater likelihood of misunderstanding hindering projects and updates.
Better iterations based on user feedback require better budgeting, planning, and execution of projects.
If collecting user feedback is a slow process, this has a knock-on effect on future iterations, and — in turn — deployment velocity. Automated testing helps speed up the feedback process because of earlier implementation.
7. Inefficient Resource Allocation from Lack of Test Automation
Organizations that don’t test — either automated or at all — are not using resources effectively.
Time, money, and attention are all diverted toward fixing problems that could’ve been avoided earlier in the process simply through proper planning.
By using automated testing, resources are allocated appropriately, projects run more smoothly, and cycle time is shorter. Risk and cost are also reduced, allowing organizations to focus efforts and resources on bigger issues.
Automate Testing and Minimize Cost and Risk
The risks of not testing software aren’t hypothetical—they’re real, measurable, and expensive.
From delayed feedback loops and resource inefficiencies to costly outages and technical debt, skipping proper testing creates compounding problems. By contrast, integrating automated testing into your implementation process reduces risk, accelerates delivery, and supports continuous improvement.
Don’t wait until it’s too late. Prioritize testing from the start—and give your projects the foundation they need to succeed.
Ready to strengthen your testing strategy? Learn how Cycle Labs empowers warehouse management and enterprise teams with scalable automated testing. Explore our platform or read success stories from companies that made testing a priority.
Test automation is the backbone of any successful enterprise testing strategy – especially as enterprise systems continue to rapidly evolve. However, implementing test automation requires commitment and investment. How do you justify it?
This calculator estimates how much money you spend on manual testing currently as a starting point for building a business case for switching to automated regression testing using the Cycle® platform.
