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Application quality and testing are more important to organizations than ever before, according to a newstudy published byCapgemini and Sogeti. This year's report found that testing and quality assurance are being recognized as key business critical functions, with companies allocating 52 percent of their testing and quality assurance IT budgets toward expanding IT landscapes rather than modernizing and maintaining legacy systems and applications.
Capgemini published its findings in the company's sixth annual World Quality Report, which interviewed 1,543 CIOs, IT directors and testing leaders from 25 countries. The report shows the average percentage of the total IT budget spent on QA has risen to 26 percent in 2014 from 18 percent in 2012, with an estimated increase to 29 percent by 2017. This includes an all-time high for testing of new applications, which now accounts for 52 percent of overall testing budgets, up from 41 percent in 2012, according to the company.
Capgemini speculates the growing need for quality assurance before launch is a result of the explosion of social media and online feedback, both of which can make or break a product upon release and severely affect brand equity.
"Testing as a function is becoming ever more business critical to IT organizations faced with external market forces that drive digital transformation," said Govind Muthukrishnan, senior vice president and Testing Global Service line leader at Capgemini Group, in a statement. "These market forces include changes in customer behavior, heightened global competition, the need to provide an all-channel experience, rapid adoption of social media channels, increased data volumes and the advancement of technologies such as cloud and mobile."
The pressure to produce quality products is compacted by the ever-present need for speed in getting solutions to market, according to Capgemini. Currently, about 93 percent of organizations have agile methods in place to speed time to market, but more than half of these organizations still see difficulties in finding a proven method or have problems with applying test automation. About 42 percent still lack the availability of the right agile testing tools as well, according to the report.
To reduce the cost of testing and keep satisfaction levels high, companies increasingly are turning to virtualization and SaaS solutions for QA, according to Capgemini. This year's report showed an increase in cloud testing from 24 percent in 2013 to 32 percent in 2014, with the market for cloud testing expected to balloon to 49 percent by 2017. However, effective mobile testing still lags behind, with about 40 percent of respondents saying they often did not have enough time to test their mobile solutions adequately. |
