Two spreadsheets that turn a testing decision into a number a finance reviewer will accept. Both are free to download, edit and put your own name on, and both are built so that every assumption is a cell you can see and change — there are no constants hidden in the formulas.
Two calculators, two starting points.
Which one you want depends on where you are starting from.
The two calculators
| Manual to Automated | For a team whose regression testing is mostly done by hand. It values the hours you stop spending and the defects you stop shipping, and sets both against what the change costs in year one. Fifteen inputs, about forty minutes. |
| Baseline and Improve | For a team that already automates. You measure five numbers on what you run today, run the same journeys on Functionize for a fixed period, measure the same five again, and value the difference. Nothing a vendor told you is an input. |
What is in each pack
| Excel workbook | The branded version, with the sheets separated and the input cells marked. This is the one to send to a finance reviewer. |
| Google Sheet | The same model as a single sheet, for working in a browser and sharing a link. Take your own copy and it is yours to edit. |
| Tear sheet (PDF) | Three pages on how to run the calculator: which numbers to gather first, how to read the result, and the challenges to expect in the review. |
The workbook and the Google Sheet are generated from one model and checked against each other, line by line, every time they are built. If they ever disagreed, the build would fail.
The principle these are built on
A calculator that only produces good news is a sales asset, and a reviewer can tell within a minute. These are built the other way round.
- Every assumption is visible and editable. Nothing is baked into a formula. If you think a number is optimistic, change it.
- The default assumptions are deliberately conservative. On the shipped defaults, Manual to Automated returns a 27% first-year return and a six-month payback — not the several-hundred-percent figure these models usually open with.
- Each one has a sensitivity sheet that shows the case under pessimistic assumptions, and with the softest benefits removed entirely. On the defaults, the pessimistic column is negative. That is the point: you should know where the case breaks before somebody else finds it.
- What is left out is stated. Faster time to market, morale, retention. All real, none defensible in a finance review, so none of them are in the model.
If you are working with our customer success team
They will walk through either calculator with you, and the useful shape of that session is not a demonstration of the spreadsheet. It is an hour spent finding your real numbers — which is often the first time an organization has written down what testing currently costs it.
Bring three numbers and the session will go much faster: how many person-hours a full manual regression pass takes, how many defects reached production last quarter, and your finance team's blended hourly cost for a tester.
Before you start: capture a baseline
Both calculators are only as good as the numbers you put in, and all of those come from your existing process rather than from Studio. What to Measure: QE Metrics and KPIs with Studio covers the five to capture, where each one comes from, and why the date matters more than the value.
Once you have decided, the same five numbers are the ones to report monthly. A business case nobody revisits teaches an organization that business cases are theater.
- What to Measure: QE Metrics and KPIs with Studio — the five numbers both calculators need
- What Makes a Good Automation Candidate — deciding what is genuinely automatable
- Test Strategy Templates You Can Use Today — the documents that follow the decision
A PDF of this page, for reading offline, printing, or passing to somebody who does not have a Studio account yet.
Value Calculators: Building the Business Case (PDF, 203 KB)
- fz-lockup-lime.png10 KB