What Great Software Testing Actually Looks Like
Software testing is the ultimate signal that you care about your users, your reputation and your future. What you do — or don’t do — speaks to your brand’s priorities and values in a way that corporate jargon never could.
As the host of the Ready, Test, Go. podcast, I’ve had the privilege of talking with authors, experts and thought leaders in software quality. One clear theme has emerged in my conversations with these prominent leaders in product development, ethics and innovation: digital quality today is far more than a functional gatekeeper. It’s a multidimensional force that affects everything from trust and business resilience to AI ethics and data integrity.
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In this blog, we’ll highlight some of my favorite perspectives from past guests — voices that capture the real value of software testing. Consider how these perspectives mesh or clash with the signals you send to your stakeholders every day.
What testing really is
When many think about software testing, they think about validation. But that notion clashes with the exploratory and curious approach often taken by testing practitioners.
Sure, software testers must ensure adequate coverage across user flows and edge cases. But their true value lies in how they think, adapt and respond to what the system reveals.
“Testing is evaluating a product by learning about it through experiencing and exploring and experimenting,” said Michael Bolton, software testing expert and consultant. “And there’s lots of other stuff that goes into that — examining it, manipulating it, observing it, making conjectures about it, generating ideas about it, and refining on those ideas and expanding them, overproducing them, abandoning the ones that we’ve overproduced and recovering the ideas that we’ve abandoned, navigating, map making, recording, reporting, thinking critically, analyzing risk, all those things.”
In this sense, software testing is a practice of continuous creative inquiry. Testers go well beyond serving as box-checkers; they’re cartographers, researchers and storytellers. Whether you’re shipping a mobile app or fine-tuning a machine learning model, remember the spectrum of motivations that encompasses the task of making sure products are ready for release.
Bolton continued: “Finding problems in something, which is what really good testing helps to do, is the first step towards making things better… its purpose, its role is an extremely positive one. We’re helping to prevent businesses and business clients from harm or loss or damage or bad feelings or diminished quality.”
In a way, the value of software testing is clearest when we consider what happens in its absence or dysfunction: broken flows, lost revenue, customer churn. But it’s also about doing right by people — your customers and your teams.
“It’s incredibly important to ensure you have solutioned the smoothest possible customer onboarding experience to your product. Is it easy for them to use?” said Gary Larkin, Chief Innovation Officer. “Make it faultless. Let the customer know they can rely upon it to work persistently over time, they’ll come back.”
Whether it’s preventing risk or improving first impressions, testing is all about helping customers trust your product. This is the core promise of functional testing, especially when it’s grounded in real-world conditions and perspectives.
Testing drives innovation
Another recurring theme on the podcast is how testing fuels innovation. Another misconception about testing is that it slows innovation. The practice could, in theory, delay a release, but the time, energy and resources spent are worth it — when done well. Digital quality promotes innovative culture and code.
“It’s important to have a culture that is just systematically building and testing,” said Todd Unger, Chief Experience Officer. “Everything you do is an opportunity to test something and learn. And then put something into motion based on that.”
Unger’s point is a reminder that testing doesn’t have to be limited to the product itself. Teams across the business should embrace testing, embedding them in workflows, marketing efforts and organizational culture. Experimentation should be routine, not rare.
“If you’re not testing, you’re not really setting yourself on a path to growth. And I think experimentation and testing is very motivating,” he said. “It is very much about constant learning and research on a daily basis, based on data and what people actually do as opposed to what they say they do.”
In this light, testing is a growth engine. Ultimately, it provides a structured path to innovation — one that’s backed by what’s real, not just what’s assumed. The best teams aren’t simply guessing; they’re learning.
Data quality matters
As digital products become increasingly data-driven, teams must expand testing beyond predictable behaviors. This includes the quality of the data those systems rely on.
“Digital quality, data quality, for me represents data that…[aligns] with the type of data that your organization would expect to use and see, and that has relatively strong parameters around data hygiene around it and continuous process for checking the quality of the data,” said Nathan Chappell, Chief AI Officer.
Clean, diverse data is central to delivering products that return reliable and fair outputs. AI systems amplify the stakes, and the margin for error is narrow. The need for human judgment in AI systems is essential, both before release and in an ongoing manner.
“You test it before it goes into production; why not test it…periodically once it’s in production?” said Josh Poduska, AI leader and strategist. “The thing with monitoring machine learning models in production, the world changes. So machine learning and AI is no different; it’s built off a set of data. And it can only be as good as that data set is built off of. If over time trends change, cultures change, opinions change of users of your model, that model is going to degrade over time. And you want to have some visibility into that.”
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But internal teams face constrictions. Resources, budget, locations, time — evaluating it all becomes a monumental task. That’s why many organizations turn to crowdtesting providers to give them the speed, scalability and flexibility they need over time.
“Third-party testing and auditing is emerging as a really good area to make sure that you have an outside view of how your model or your platform is performing,” said Jason Mills, engineering leader. “In some cases, we don’t know how [AI] comes to that answer. But we want to make sure that we have at least a third-party checking that. Applause happens to be one of the leaders globally in providing those services…and I think it offers a tremendous value to the organizations.”
These quotes get at the heart of Applause’s real-world testing approach — combining top expertise and real-world insights to help brands meet their quality, compliance and strategic goals.
Centering users and ethics
For that matter, testing isn’t really about code. It’s about people — and how they experience, understand and feel the effect of what we build. That’s why their perspectives are invaluable; they’re the ones that use the product after all. Their feedback pays dividends throughout the development life cycle — if you can capture it.
“Usability testing should absolutely be as left as possible in the life cycle,” said Inge de Bleecker, UX expert. “As soon as you have a prototype, start usability testing now.”
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As teams test for usability and function, there’s a growing realization that ethical design decisions — including how and why data is collected and used — are also important. While polished, high-performance software is the goal, organizations should also define (and refine) their principles over time as standards change, technologies emerge, harms are discovered and customers express their preferences.
“We need to really think about and be more reflective about, to what extent are we over collecting data?” said Wendy Wong, a professor and researcher. “The impetus, especially in more data-intensive fields, is just to take the data that they can and think about it later. And so you end up with all these data that have never been touched or have, really, no stated purpose in advance. Yet, they exist. We need to resist that urge and really be more reflective to think more about the idea of data minimization, and how human rights can give us the moral framework around which to build a norm out about data minimization.”
These are the kinds of conversations we need more of in tech. Organizations must build experiences that respect users as people, not just conversions. And it could even come to be seen as a business differentiator as consumers exercise their broader buying power.
The signal you send
What signals are you sending with your digital quality priorities? Testing is a mindset and a commitment. The work doesn’t end. It’s about putting users first, staying adaptable and building trust through every interaction — not an easy feat.
That’s why so many brands work with Applause. Our approach pairs real people with real devices in real environments with expert guidance and scalable processes. The result? Faster releases, better insights and measurable business impact — an independent IDC report calculated that Applause customers achieve nearly 70% more efficient testing teams and complete functional testing cycles 36% faster.
If your team is ready to raise the bar, Applause is ready to help. Our managed services cover everything from functional testing to accessibility testing, UX and Gen AI validation. With a global community of more than one million testers across 200-plus countries and territories, we help leading brands build better products, faster.
Subscribe to the Ready, Test, Go. podcast on Apple or Spotify today to hear from industry experts about product strategy and digital quality.
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