Nowadays digital products are everywhere and every day in our lives. In this article, we will cover what a digital product is, why a digital product should be tested properly before it is distributed and why nearshore digital product testing is the best option to reduce costs and scale your business model quickly.
What is a Digital Product?
What if I ask you a question about products, what is a Product? You may think of something that can be sold in the market or bought from the market. Something tangible which you can sense with any of your senses has usability and functionality. But think about something which you cannot touch or feel it i.e., something intangible. Would you refer to it as a product?
Yes, of course, that is exactly what digital products are. A digital product is an intangible good created using data and software. It might seem odd to claim this article to be a product which you are reading online right now. Try a search on Google. Is the search result a product to you? Or your company’s website, what about it?
According to many viewpoints, everything which gives meaning to your life or something which creates value to a group of people is simply a product. These people can be buyers, sellers, users, or customers of that product. According to this definition of the product, all the search results on Google or Bing are products, they address a challenge to find the information very quickly. Even a Facebook account is also a digital product as it helps you to stay in contact with your friends and family. The same purpose is served by websites that give value to enterprises in the form of generated revenue, helping them sell their other products or services, and serving their business goals as well. All these products are considered Digital Products. A software-enabled product or service that offers some kind of utility to human beings is called a Digital Product.
Examples of Digital Products
No matters, it could be a tangible or intangible product. Keeping the above definition in view, a better understanding of digital products can be figured out. These can be in the form of Websites, Mobile Apps, Web Apps, cloud-based applications, online games, music, photos, videos, logos, graphics, online advertisements, e-books, streaming media, electronic tickets, internet coupons, and even this article you are reading now. These are all digital products.
What is important in all these digital products is their intangibility, which gives them an edge over other physical products in many ways. For example, a digital product is an environment-friendly and cost-effective product that is created once but can be updated many times as required according to customers/users’ needs. These can also be sold to as many customers/users as possible, even a single digital product can be sold to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of customers/users. It makes all the digital products highly profitable entities for their creators or investors in this field.
The cost of Testing Digital Products
But there also exists very serious challenges associated with the development of these digital products. A little bit of miscalculation on your behalf can create big losses for the company instead of generating revenue from the digital product. Whether it is in the form of a Website, Mobile Application, or Web Application, you need to know costs associated with the development of your digital products and inference of fact that whether these costs are viable for your business model or your organization’s capacity? Whether these costs are reasonable enough to turn into profitable revenue for your company in the future? Although there come different costs associated with the development of a digital product in the whole development cycle, one such important cost is the Testing cost, which is very significant in deciding the future success of the product.
It is not just a cost associated with the product, but a criterion for checking the viability of your product. That is why the testing stage should be given special heed before launching the product, and a testing methodology should be chosen with special attention.
With the development of the latest trends in digital technology, Testing has evolved so fast over the years. Even a single application now interacts with a variety of software and systems and that is why the testing stage is very crucial to check multiple parameters including proper functioning of your product, identification of all the loopholes, and its market scalability to decide the roadmap for the launch of your digital product. For such sophisticated and highly integrated digital products of modern times, traditional software testing techniques are not effective enough to give viable results.
Automated software testing Due to which multiple traditional software testing techniques are getting outdated including both Automated Testing (which does not provide a real-world automation environment) and Manual Testing (which is both time and cost expensive, also not feasible for large-scale projects). The cost of testing digital products using traditional testing methods can go against your desired cost estimates and it would not also deliver efficient testing results in return.
That is why smart companies across the world prefer Agile Testing for their technologically rich products which is an interactive framework that provides an application with the development of a real-world testing environment with maximum accuracy instead of forcing the application to adjust into the predefined test.
Nearshore testing
For testing your digital product, you might get stuck into the hype of advertisements by many companies providing their services in this field. But you need to choose the one which can accomplish your product goal in high quality but at a low price. You can easily find many of the onshore, nearshore, and offshore companies for this purpose. Nearshore product testing is considered an operational testing service being provided to nearby countries relatively close to the mainland. While offshore product testing means the provision of testing services to distant countries, more explicitly, situated in other continents.
Many of the African, East European, and Asian offshore companies are providing software testing services at apparently low prices but the quality of their software testing is very low and highly outdated which costs you many folds in the next stages. The reason is that these offshore companies are not as technologically rich enough as those of nearshore software testing companies in the US and Canada. Nor do these hype-creating companies are having world-class standards to follow. Once you pay your money, you get stuck in their cycle. You cannot even go behind them in case of low quality of work as they might be sitting far away from you, where jurisdictions of your country do not even hold.
That is why, it is highly recommended to play safe with nearshore companies around you in the US, Canada, and surrounding countries. Onshore companies can also provide you with a good deal to go with them. But nearshore companies are capable of offering the flexibility of choosing from a large range of options in your nearshore vicinity along with an open market competition among a large number of competitors which in the case of onshore companies exist in the form of relatively lower competition both in terms of quality and the cost. Furthermore, nearshore companies can also provide you with testing services by taking into account the needs of the customer/user of your digital product.
Understanding customers or users is also very important in the successful launch of the product. Being in a nearshore vicinity, your hiring company can also better understand the behaviors and needs of your customers/users in comparison to those offshore companies having a lot of social and cultural differences to your demography. That is why your offshore testing partners cannot understand the demographics of the area where you are going to launch your digital product in comparison to those of your nearshore testing partners. Nearshore testing costs less, with high quality, and low-cost easy to access means of communication between the hired and hiring entities, due to which, it is always a recommended choice of the smart companies.
Conclusion
With advancements in the technological sphere, this field is in fast-paced evolution where digital products are rapidly taking the place of physical products because of their immense potential to address real-world challenges. But development and testing costs of digital products are very important parameters to decide the future success of the product. That is why these costs should always be controlled without any trade-off with the quality of development and testing. This purpose can effectively be achieved through nearshore test deployment of digital products, which is a far better choice in comparison to offshore test deployment in many ways, due to its low-cost solution, enhanced quality, customer/user understanding, and easy to access means of communication.