Why Testing is Mission Critical?

Why Testing is Mission Critical?
Scott Dennison
12-19-06

As we move toward the delivery of our VideoVcard product to a strategic partner this week, we had the opportunity to discover fist hand, how important testing is in the process.


It is in this phase of product launch that both parties get to see if our ideas work as intended.

As we learned almost immediately, the set-up of a new account seems easy enough and should be easy for customers. After all, it is easy for us to do...

So the partner goes in to set up his account and... oops... hmmm... why does it do this, and this and this?

And, what's going on with that?

And how do I get it to do this or that?

Mild frustration quickly became fascination and opened the door to a wonderful learning opportunity. A few settings were changed, and the database was cleared to mimic a new customer entering for the first time.

Next was navigating the customers Kodak Easyshare software that manages their pictures and videos wherein we discovered it was better to pull the video directly from the camera and bypassing the software completely.

Finally with the video uploaded, encoded and approved for use by the customer, we had only one final challenge and that was to update the background to one of the customers choosing.

In the initial attempt the new background was selected, but the update button was not pressed, so the system did not accept the change.

Once the sequence was done correctly, everything worked perfectly.

So what were some of the lessons in this exercise?

First is that engineering listens to and clarifies the vision of the client / partner. They then proceed to build it to function as described.

Sales learns how to describe what the product will do and how it all works. But as sales is prone to do, they make it sound really easy...

Once the customer / client / partner begins to use the product, the real learning can begin. It's in that time of the user interfacing with the product that you can bring engineering, sales and customer experience all together as one entity.

So I am glad we had the experience, because now we can deliver a better product and a better user experience. And that is the secret to a more profitable venture!

~Scott
KeyThing Marketing Technologies