Notes for the person deciding whether to build something, and what to build first. Software development cost, timelines, the trade-offs nobody mentions until the invoice arrives. Nothing here is written for other developers: if a piece cannot help you decide something or ask a better question, it does not get published.
6 articles so far, in four groups: what an internal tool costs and how it is scoped, what changes when the product lives on a phone, how automated tests earn their keep, and what it takes to release and keep something alive. New ones arrive every few days — the schedule is set, so the queue does not depend on anybody remembering.
Everyone says they test. Four questions separate the studios that do from the ones that mean "we clicked through it before release", and none of them require you to be technical.
The suite is delivered, the invoice is paid, the studio moves on. Six months later half the tests are switched off. This is the failure mode nobody quotes for, and it is avoidable.
Most of what breaks in an app happens outside your app: the permission dialog, the payment sheet, the push notification, the process the operating system killed while nobody was looking.
Nobody has the budget to cover every screen, and covering every screen would not help anyway. A short, opinionated method for choosing the first fifteen journeys.
Almost every team we meet has tests. Half of them are failing, the pipeline is set to continue anyway, and everyone has quietly agreed not to mention it. The cause is almost never laziness.
Quotes for test automation range from four thousand to forty-five, for work that sounds identical on the page. Here is what sits behind the numbers and how to tell which one you are being sold.
Reading rather than deciding? The case studies are the same arguments applied to two real products, with the prices, the timelines and a demo you can open on sample data.