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Question:

How do companies afford Tosca? How do testers and QA teams justify the expense to their managers/company?

Background:

The only testing software I've used is Selenium; for online app testing. Selenium is free

Our team is starting to build a Desktop application. For Desktop testing, it appears that the safest most reliable testing frameworks (testing languages, libraries) are not free. I understand and am okay with this fact.

However, I am dumbfounded by the price of some of the software. This is much different than the world of online app testing.

Questions:

How is it that I don't hear more conversation about expense and justification of expense? I was quoted around $11,000 to $15,000 for Tosca per year. Please, how are you convincing your company (and yourself and manager) that this is a worthwhile investment? So many companies use it; but how with it being so expensive? I have been searching a long time for answers to this question. Not sure where else to go to ask. If there is a better place for this discussion, put the link below.

Are you using it for something other than end-to-end UI testing and basic functional UI testing?

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    I think your question is opinion-based (and contextual-based). It will be worth for some, not for others.
    – João Farias
    Commented Apr 15, 2022 at 20:59
  • Yes, @JoãoFarias, you might be correct. Where can you ask questions like this? The question 'how can you afford it' isn't opinion based though. Do people use this and this enables them to hire less people? So cost of software over cost of an additional tester?
    – Fractal
    Commented Apr 15, 2022 at 21:52
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    There are plenty of conversation in the business dept. Unfortunately they may be separate from the tech dept that can explain the benefits as well as the costs. If tech can't justify the value of their tools, they will likely be replaced by cheap crappy ones in my experience.
    – Michael Durrant
    Commented Apr 17, 2022 at 10:53
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    Generalized title to be more useful to others in more situations
    – Michael Durrant
    Commented Apr 17, 2022 at 10:55
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    Just a thought that hasn't been said yet, but have you tried looking at Appium for desktop testing, at least Windows apps? If you add your requirements for your desktop app maybe we can come up with other tools to recommend.
    – Lee Jensen
    Commented Apr 18, 2022 at 18:19

1 Answer 1

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Because it is a low cost option

Selenium is free software. But you have to pay people to develop using it.

Automation Engineers can cost $50,000 - $150,000 each per year in the US. Deciding to employ and pay them is the hard choice.

10% of the cost of one engineer for tools that greatly increase all engineers efficiency seems fairly reasonable from a business perspective. Especially if there are multiple engineers. If the increase in productivity is significant the tool is probably saving money.

When programmers and accountant work closely together, both learn about the true costs and wise approaches

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    Phrasing it slightly different than a low cost option would be to look at it as a a force multiplier. Companies easily justify the cost of laptops, IDE licenses, cloud services, Docker licenses, etc - automation software licenses fall on the same spectrum.
    – ernie
    Commented Apr 19, 2022 at 20:22

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