Businesses are struggling with speed of technological change: World Quality Report

The speed of this digital transformation within organisations has been identified as a clear hurdle, with 55 percent of organisations identifying ‘application functionality changing too quickly’ as their biggest challenge.

The World Quality Report report, released by Capgemini in conjunction with HP, found that organisations are placing more importance on quality assurance and testing due to the speed of digital transformation, which is increasing the number of new applications that are shaking up their business operations.

The report surveyed 1,560 respondents from 32 countries, and is based on analysis of five respondent groups: CIO, VP Application, IT Director, QA/Testing Manager and CDO/CMO.

In an attempt to gain control over the influx of new applications, the report found a 9 percent yoy increase in IT spending budgets directed towards testing and quality assurance.

Of this budget, almost half (49 percent) is dedicated to maintenance work, focused on trying to ensure applications are suitable for business use.

Relatedly, budget spent on new transformational work has decreased by 1 percent as companies begin to reign in their spending to focus on coping with the continuous transformation of applications, the report said.

This year’s World Quality Report found that companies are continuing to invest in securing the integrity of their systems, with more than four out of five (81 percent) citing security as the main purpose for testing.

“This heightened awareness of security is driven by digital transformation and security testing has become critical to business assurance for many organisations.”

However, the role of the customer experience is now almost as important to companies with 79 percent identifying this as a key consideration for their quality assurance testing. “This marks a notable shift for organisations who have come to realise the growing importance of providing customers with a smooth, seamless experience whenever they come into contact with the company’s properties.”

With spend on quality testing and assurance increasing, a higher proportion of that budget is now dedicated to DevOps and Agile principles, with more than half (59 percent) of respondents saying at least half of projects within the organisation use DevOps principles and 47 percent use virtual test environments.

While organisations attempt to modernise their testing practices and procedures, they also have to deal with the increasingly shorter life cycles of programmes and applications, which is forcing an increase in demand for testing hardware and infrastructure: an increase of 5 percent from 2014 to 38 percent.

However, despite the decrease in spending on new transformational work (down 1 percent), almost one in three (29 percent) are intent on developing Testing Centers of Excellence (TCoE) within the next two years.

The maturity of the quality assurance market has seen the function become a critical business operation. With an increasing number of organisations now adopting DevOps and Agile, there are a number of new roles being created to match the growing importance and size of the market. Roles that never previously existed, such as Software Development Test Engineers, are now appearing and the demand for these positions is only likely to increase as quality assurance becomes more central to the operation of organisations, the study highlighted.