Testing in the XP Paradigm: A Case Study

The application in this case study is a new Web application developed for a Fiduciary Trust company. The company had been assured by their eXtreme developers that testers were unnecessary in this Web project. Since the risk of project failure would be measured in millions of dollars in lost business, someone thought it a good idea to risk a few hundred on a second opinion. This turned out to be a good risk for them and a really good opportunity to measure the
cost of not testing. This paper gives the account of what happened when this application went on line, and presents
a review of the test log, and the bugs reported. Because of the nature of the project and the type of failures that occurred, this project provided a unique opportunity to calculate the cost of not testing and the value of testing in terms of customer support dollars that would have been spent without testing and the that were saved because of testing.