While 75% of organisations highlight continuous testing as critical or important, only a minority have made exceptional progress acquiring the necessary knowledge and key enablers to drive digital transformation.
This is according to a CA study, “Continuous Testing as a Digital Business Enabler”.
The 20% of survey respondents identified as continuous testing ‘Leaders’ enjoy a boost to software delivery speed, quality and efficiency, resulting in a better return on investments for continuous delivery.
According to the study, leaders were:
* 2.3-times more likely to have succeeded in left-shifting testing activity;
* 2.6-times more likely to reduce defects by more than 50%;
* 2.4-times more confident in quality of output;
* 1.9-times more confident in speed of delivery; and
* Leaders were also 3.9-times more likely to be working in an organisation exhibiting rapid revenue growth.
“As organisations build their modern software factories, it is important not to sacrifice quality in the quest for ever greater speed and efficiency in business growth and success,” says Jaco Greyling, chief technology officer: DevOps at CA Southern Africa. “Software quality and testing is becoming everyone’s responsibility and it is incumbent that business and IT management ensure everyone is appropriately enabled – business analysts, developers, release managers and operations professionals all play role in the quality chain.”
While 93% of respondents reported testing automation as important, only 1 in 5 said they achieved a good level of test automation coverage (80% or more), leaving four out of five still relying heavily on manual processes. The majority of respondents attributed challenges to the lack of automation in almost every aspect of the testing process and tooling; from the generation of test cases, through test execution, to critical activities such as fast, safe and efficient test data management.
The importance of automating test data was also highlighted as a top need in ensuring test data is available when needed and avoiding personally identifiable information.
Nevertheless, the majority of respondents felt they weren’t efficient in this area, even though it would make it easier to safeguard personal data across both development and testing environments and meet ever stricter data privacy legislation, such as the European Union’s imminent General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Throughout the study, all respondents highlighted the importance of modern methodologies like deploying agile development, continuous delivery, and DevOps.
When pressed to prioritise, and call out a singular key to success, 63% of respondents said it is the combination of agile development plus continuous delivery that optimises the effective integration of activities throughout the whole software development lifecycle.
Overall, a holistic and balanced approach of both modern practices and tooling are reshaping how software is developed and supporting business transformation across industries.
