Introduction

Based on the future test plan and refined project plan, this post presents a vague cost analysis for the testing and release of the product.

Requirements Testing  

The requirements testing contains 17 tests, which relate to 11 functional requirements and 6 non-functional requirements.  The application will be tested with free automated validation tools.

As scheduled, the whole testing will be assigned 15 days, with 2 application testers working full time. According to ITJobSearch.co.uk which monitors the UK IT job market, an average annual salary of software testing job is £38,000. Therefore, the salary for hiring two application testers during the testing periods would be estimated to be £3200.

On the other hand, the facility and equipment cost may contribute to around £500, which includes buying two mobile devices for testing.

Accessibility Test

This test will be assigned 8 days to complete. Since the group will use free web accessibility evaluation tools (Pearce, 2015), no software fee contributes in this test category.

User Testing

This test will be assigned 8 days to complete. Firstly, it was a tough decision to decide how many users would be involved in the user testing, since the number of users will affect the estimated testing costs and time required. Researchers have various opinions on the number of users involved in the user testing, some suggested 5 users would be enough (Virzi, 1992), some claiming that 5 was not enough (Spool & Schroeder, 2001), while some suggested it should be around 8 to 12 (Hwang & Salvendy, 2010), and some claimed that 15 could cover most of the usability problems (Jakob & Landauer, 1993).

The group decided to keep the voluntary users number above all of the minimum ones that researchers suggested. Finally, the group agreed that the minimum number of user will be 2 sets of 15 voluntary users, resulting 30 users in total. By assuming each user contributes to £10 of the place rental cost, the place rental for user testing would be £300. On the other hand, the facility and equipment cost may contribute to around £500, which could be buying one additional mobile device for testing.

Release cost

The release cost is basically the publishing fees on different mobile application platforms. Up to 25^th April, the Android Play’s (http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/start.html)   registration fee is USD$25 (ie. £16) and the iOS Developer Program’s (https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/ ) is USD$99 each year (ie. £65/year) .

Estimated total cost for the testing and release of the product

Therefore, table 1 is the estimated cost for the testing and release of the product, which the total cost would be £4381 . From the pie chart in figure 1, the requirement testings dominate the cost, while user testing and release cost result are less than a quarter of the cost.

Table 1: Estimated cost for the testing and release of the product

Figure 1 Estimated cost distribution on testing and release product

Conclusion

This post gives a vague cost analysis for the testing and release of the product, and the estimated total cost would be £4381. The costs mentioned above are minimal expenses. Other factors, such as using proprietary software, recruiting users for testing and marketing, are not be considered in this analysis.

This post represents considerable consideration of the product above and beyond the marking criteria and the success criteria, showing innovation. It illustrates a realistic plan for a cost benefit analysis of the product which would be a vital component to testing and further development, showing story and structure. It also features media components to illustrate this such as a pie chart. Finally, this post discusses the break down of engineering stages and the costs that these would have. 

References

Hwang, W. & Salvendy, G., 2010. Number of people required for usability evaluation: the 10±2 rule. Commun. ACM, 53(5), pp. 130-133.

Jakob, N. & Landauer, T. K., 1993. A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems. ACM Proceedings of the INTERACT’93 and CHI’93 conference on Human factors in computing systems., pp. 206-213.

Pearce, E., 2015. Future Test Plan for the App. [Online]
Available at: http://blog.soton.ac.uk/onep/2015/04/27/test-plan/
[Accessed 25 April 2015].

Spool, J. & Schroeder, W., 2001. Testing Web Sites: Five Users is Nowhere Near Enough. In: CHI ’01 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Seattle: ACM, pp. 285–286.

Virzi, R. A., 1992. Refining the test phase of usability evaluation: How many subjects is enough?. Human Factors: The Journal of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society , 34(4), pp. 457-468.

By Po Ting Tse