Return On Investment

If you use XStudio in your professional organization and purchase one of our Commercial Licenses, you will make some huge financial savings as soon as the first year. This page will show you how and how much.

The Return On Investment (ROI) can be split into 2 categories:

• Time saved: consists in calculating how much of your QA/Test effort will be saved by introducing XStudio as a test management solution in your organization.
• Quality Improvement: this is about determining how XStudio can improve the overal quality of your products.

Time saved (so money)

We collected some data from our customers in the past and added some fair estimations about how much XStudio can help Test engineers and managers in their daily work and hence how much of their time can be saved.

Setting up XStudio is technically trivial and there is most of the time no need for training but just a few days to discover all the features included in XStudio!


This is based on the following estimates and figures returned to us:

Task	Time saved	Comment
Manage requirements and specifications	25%	with XStudio, you get rid of all the manual activities related to: indexing items from external documents, editing manually the traceability matrix, maintaining the traceability matrix when new requirements/specifications are added or removed, versioning the requirements and specifications All these tasks represent at least 25% of the time spent of managing the requirements and specifications.
Writing/updating test plan	10%	All tests and test cases being versioned by XStudio, you do not have to take care about duplicating your test plans. In addition, depending on your preferences you can choose to enter your test plan either using simple formatted text or through a formal tree template hence initiating people to structure more their test procedures. XStudio provides also flexible search mechanisms and automatically generates unique identifiers for each of your test cases. All this will save around 10% of the time of your team.
Compute coverage of the test campaigns	100%	Doing this manually is nearly impossible or extremely time consuming. XStudio is doing this automatically for you so all the time your engineers were spending on this is now free for other tasks.
Document management (sharing, versions etc.)	25%	There is no more problems of sharing documents between developers/testers with XStudio. Documents are versioned and managed based on a powerful locking system to avoid conflicts. At least 25% of the total time spent on document management will be saved if you use XStudio.
Selection and ordering of tests to execute	25%	Manually selecting the right tests for a campaign and manually ordering them can be tricky especially when you requires some logic inside the execution engine to run some tests only if some parent tests succeeded. XStudio does that smoothly for you. The ordering can be automatically calculated based on: dependencies between tests, priorities affected to tests, or manually if you prefer Again, at least 25% of the time your engineers are currently spending on this will be freed.
Automated tests execution	5%	If you already have some automated test suites, you are probably using some scripts that will have to be maintained, scheduled (through cron or similar third-party systems). XStudio takes care of all this for you thus avoiding to acquire again some new competencies in specific scripting languages or IT knowledge.
Manual tests execution	15%	Executing manual test campaigns means that the operator needs to record the results in some way (i.e. in a document, excel sheet etc.). This also generally goes with errors due to context switching: reading the procedure, executing the procedure, writing the results The integrated manual execution environment in XStudio allows gathering all this in one single interacting module. This means no more context switching. The test operator just follows instructions and answers questions asked by the system. Manual test executions are going much faster and are less human-error prone. Customer's feedback is that they saved between 10% and 20% on manual test execution using XStudio.
Bugs submission/verification	5%	Switching to the bug-tracking database while tests are being executed is a source of problems. Submitting new bugs (or linking a failed test to an already existing bug) is completely integrated in XStudio's manual tests module. Hence all these context-switching and integration problems naturally disappear. We estimate that using XStudio saves 5% of the total time spent on bug submission and verification
Results analysis	15%	XStudio provides many metrics that considerably helps the analyst: coverage on the requirements/specifications progression/regression in comparison to previously executed test campaigns evolution in time of the results of a test bugs associated to a campaign, test, requirement, specification or SUT etc. The analysis of the results is hence much easier for the engineer and he will save 15% of his time to get better output.
Reports writing	75%	XStudio generates many reports for you. If needed, you can enter your own introduction, conclusions, analysis etc. in XStudio so that they are included in the output document. Also, reports are 100% customizable to meet your company's guidelines. In many cases, people don't even need any human intervention and XStudio's reports are just deivered as-is. A huge time-saving feature!
Archiving test results	100%	Archiving test results is automatic in XStudio and you can easily see the evolution of the tests results. Doing this manually or with inappropriate tools can be tricky if not impossible. With XStudio, all the time your engineers used to spend on this will be saved.
Consolidation Reqs/Specs vs bugs	75%	Building relationships between SUTs, requirements/specifications, tests and bugs is almost impossible manually while XStudio does provide the tools to do this very easily. At the end, XStudio can show you which requirements or specifications implementations have some defects by using those links. We can estimate that only 25% of what you used to do in the past to get metrics on how much of the requirements are affected by the bugs found will remain. The rest will be 100% automated and produced by XStudio.
Measure performances of developers to fix bugs	75%	It's very hard to track performances of developers. XStudio provides (for each developer) some statistics and charts demonstrating their personal performances (fixing rate), which kind of bugs they fixed first (priority, severity etc.). Those metrics are really efficient and allow you to have a much more accurate view on the developer's personal performances hence saving 75% of your time spent on face to face interviews, cross-evaluations etc.
Measure performances of testers to find bugs	75%	The same way, it's very hard to track performances of testers. XStudio provides as well individual statistics and charts demonstrating submitting/closing rates for each of your testers, which kind of bugs they submited the most (priority, severity etc.). Again, reviewing performances is then much easier and faster.
Estimate the sanity of the projects	50%	XStudio managing all the entities in the product life-cycle, it can provide extremely useful metrics on the sanity of the projects while it's almost impossible to do this reliably manually or with inappropriate softwares.

Quality Improvement

In addition to the substantial financial savings above, many pros will be observed using XStudio:

• your projects will always be perfectly under control
• you reduce the risk of bad reporting and/or "PEBKAC" effect (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair)
• your QA/test team will focus on interesting/smart things rather than loosing time on tasks that could be automated
• your QA/test team will enjoy even better their work -see previous item- so this will decrease your turn-over rate