As they enter a period of recovery, most organizations (85 percent) recognize that their application portfolios are in need of rationalization and that mission critical applications implemented using outdated technology must be revised and updated to increase efficiency, a survey has found.
As a result, 42 percent of companies plan to increase their budget allocation for application quality assurance (QA) and testing. And as companies seek to adopt agile delivery methods as part of their application quality assurance, the percentage of companies who are moving at least some of their IT systems to the cloud has grown to 81 percent. The emergence of new technologies such as cloud-based services is also fueling the need for stringent testing and QA, as application security becomes vital for ensuring quality and mitigating risk.
Investment in quality assurance is greatest in emerging economies. In the last year, 83 percent of Chinese companies and 56 percent of Brazilian companies substantially increased their QA investment, contrasting with relatively steady budgets in North America and Europe. The focus on quality assurance across Australian organizations has also increased markedly over the past year, with 37 percent of survey respondents indicating that their testing budgets had gone up. Increasingly, investment in QA is focused on promoting efficiency and standardization, often through creating Testing Centers of Excellence to centralize and consolidate QA practices, particularly in emerging market companies.
Emerging economies are also the fastest adopters of cloud infrastructure:
-- Over a third of Chinese companies (37 percent) plan to migrate between 11 and 25 percent of their applications to the cloud in the next year with a further 40 percent making arrangements to host between 26 and 50 percent;
-- In contrast, 24 percent of companies in the North America and 18 percent of Western and Northern European companies indicate they still have no interest in migrating their applications to the cloud.
The adoption of cloud and the growing reliance on Internet-based applications is also raising the importance placed on application security, which in the past has typically been seen by companies as an audit and risk management function. Over a quarter (27 percent) of large organizations (5,000+ employees), are putting in place dedicated information security (IS) teams to design and test security procedures and requirements to ensure new systems and applications have not been compromised and that confidential and sensitive information is protected from access or damage by unauthorised users. Testing in the cloud means a new generation of testers will need to manage the entire portfolio of IT services rather than just verifying the quality of individual systems.
Businesses' continue to rely on outsourcing for application testing. Over two thirds (70 percent) of respondents employ contractors or third party vendors for quality assurance. No longer are they looking to only outsource test execution, but also testing strategy, user acceptance testing and security. Preference for outsourcing continues to be co-location (27 percent) followed by near-shore locations within a company's country or continent (24 percent). However, preference of off-shore locations differs between North American and European organizations. For companies based in the US and Canada the next choice is often India (18 percent), followed by China (12 percent), and Eastern Europe (9 percent) while for the first time, Western and Northern European companies have indicated they prefer to outsource QA to Eastern Europe (12 percent) or China (7 percent) over India (4 percent).
The report also highlights the need for the standardization of QA, through proven methodologies, as increasing importance is placed on measuring business impact, whether linking results to business goals or quantifying losses from potential application defects. There has also been a continued rise in test automation to help address this:
-- 37 percent use internally developed estimation techniques and a further 22 percent of companies use industry standard estimation methods and yet 12 percent have no consistent methodology at all;
-- However, the majority of companies (58 percent) carry out up to half of their QA without using automation. Only 23 percent use automated testing solutions for over half of tests.
Comment from Raf Howery, vice president, Global Channels and Partners Executive, Capgemini: CIOs are under intense pressure to deliver high quality applications on a tight budget. Migrating high quality applications to the cloud is a natural progression as it offers a cost effective, reliable and agile arena to create and test them in. Further investment in QA, especially in developed markets, will help ensure companies can flourish in the cloud once the technology is fully adopted.
Comment from Jonathan Rende, general manager and vice president, Applications, Software, HP: Today trends like cloud and mobile are elevating the complexity of applications. Organizations are challenged more than ever to maintain their competitive edge by delivering higher quality software while remaining agile. The results of the World Quality Report underscore how the discipline of quality management, global sourcing and agile processes must become integral to an organization's software delivery strategy to effectively innovate faster.
About the survey: Capgemini, a provider of consulting, technology and outsourcing services, and Sogeti, its local professional services division, together with HP today released the findings of the third annual World Quality Report. The World Quality Report Survey was completed by 1,200 CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, IT directors and managers and QA managers around the world, including North America (39 percent), Western Europe (33 percent), Australia (8 percent), China (8 percent), Brazil (5 percent) and other regions in Europe, Asia and Latin America (7 percent). The survey also included responses from a variety of different company sizes.
Contact: http://www.capgemini.com/testing; http://www.sogeti.com/testing
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