The Economics of Testing: Making the Business Case for Quality with Vitaly Sharovatov

In this episode, Chris Harbert sits down with Vitaly Sharovatov, a seasoned developer and engineering manager with over 22 years of experience.

Vitaly serves as a developer advocate at Qase, a test case management platform, and has written extensively about AI, testing methodology, and the economics of software quality.

The conversation tackles a question every quality advocate faces: how do you convince leadership to invest in testing? Vitaly shares practical frameworks for quantifying the business value of quality and making the case for prevention over firefighting.

Key topics covered:

• Why developers implicitly do testing already—and why they should understand it deeply
• A simpler approach: quantifying the costs of bad quality you're already paying (support calls, lost sales, maintenance overhead)
• The social dynamics of selling quality ideas—finding allies and helping managers "show off" cost savings
• When to automate vs. when to test manually: understanding the economic inflection point
• The hidden costs of poor quality on team morale, burnout, and employee retention

Vitaly shares real-world examples, including a dating app where automated tests passed but a critical button was hidden below the viewport, and an insurance company that staffed 300 people for quarters to work around a poorly tested API.

The episode wraps up with a key insight: most quality problems have social roots within organizations. Success requires not just good testing practices, but the ability to win allies, understand incentives, and sell ideas to stakeholders who aren't always rational economic actors.

Whether you're trying to justify a testing initiative to leadership, optimize your team's approach to quality, or simply understand the true cost of defects, this episode provides a practical economic lens for thinking about software testing.

Find Vitaly at beyondquality.org, a non-commercial community focused on collaborative research into testing economics, or connect with him on LinkedIn.