GrammaTech announced a technology partnership with GitLab, the single application for the DevOps lifecycle.
Overall, C-suite executives are happy with the applications and solutions that come out of the pipeline. However, businesses are still frustrated by the speed of delivery, according to a recent study from Forrester Consulting, commissioned by Eggplant.
The research identified that improving the customer experience is the number one goal for organizations when planning and orchestrating their software strategy. The study also highlights a gap between IT and business leaders thinking when it comes to testing strategy.
To accelerate digital transformation, business leaders recognize that delivering the best customer experience hinges on the quality of their software.
Key findings:
■ Improving the customer experience is the number one requirement for organizations (49%), but almost half of businesses are not testing the user experience
■ Business focused on product usability but frustrated with the speed of app development
■ 47% of teams on average are exploring an intelligent approach to AI usage
■ IT leaders focused on reducing testing times, and feel held back by budgets, fragmented legacy technology and access to skills
The Testing Quality Conundrum
The transformation of testing is facing several hurdles as firms move towards continuous, AI-enabled test automation, including budget pressure, legacy technology being difficult to automate, and lack of the necessary skills. Businesses are having to do more with less, and using AI brings the significance of business testing back into focus, making companies smarter about what to test.
As a result of the desire for organizations to achieve superior customer experiences, speed, and quality have become essential in application delivery. However, the study also found that there is much room for improvement, especially when ensuring that quality is maintained.
■ 51% of application development teams are still applying manual functional testing
■ 46% scored the speed of testing as average, fair, or poor
■ 41% stated that the speed of their overall application development was average, fair, or poor
■ 36% also rated the quality of code in development (for testing) as average or worse
Organizations want to move towards continuous testing to increase levels of automation but are currently lagging in their capabilities to do so. However, firms that are evolving toward a continuous delivery model are transforming testing practices as part of this shift to continuous testing.
■ 52% of application development teams are implementing continuous testing
■ 49% currently apply automated functional testing
■ 47% of teams are exploring an intelligent approach to AI usage
The research identified several significant challenges that are constraining testing capabilities:
■ 32% stated that budget pressure is stifling testing innovation
■ 26% of firms pointed to legacy technology that is fragmented and difficult to automate
■ 25% highlighted that the right technical skills was the third highest challenge
The findings shed more light on the need for app development and delivery teams to fully embrace a more agile, DevOps, continuous, and automated approach to software delivery. To realize this transformation, there needs to be some fundamental changes in testing approaches to enable software delivery at speed without compromising quality.
Industry News
Exadel announced that Sun Capital Partners, a private investment firm, has completed an acquisition of the company.
Palo Alto Networks completed its acquisition of Bridgecrew, a developer-first cloud security company.
Red Hat announced the latest release of Red Hat Process Automation, which delivers new developer tooling, extended support for eventing and streaming for event-driven architectures (EDA) through integration with Apache Kafka, and new monitoring capabilities through heatmap dashboards.
Leaders of the software development industry announced the formation of the Value Stream Management Consortium (VSMC).
Delphix and GenRocket announced a technology alliance designed to fulfill the needs of enterprise customers who desire a comprehensive test data solution that improves software quality.
JFrog announced that its DevOps Platform tools – JFrog Artifactory and JFrog Xray – are available with native deployment templates for customers using AWS GovCloud (US) and Azure Government clouds.
Spectro Cloud announced support for existing Kubernetes environments, including clusters on public cloud services such as Amazon EKS, Azure AKS and Google GKE, has been added to the Spectro Cloud Kubernetes management platform.
Idera announced the acquisition of PreEmptive Solutions, LLC, a provider of application protection and security.
CloudBolt Software announced the launch of OneFuse Community Edition, a free version of its codeless integration platform for automating, integrating, and extending private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.
DBmaestro launched support for Snowflake, the Data Cloud company.
Platform9 closed Series-D funding with an additional $12.5 million for a total of $37.5 million.
Red Hat announced Red Hat OpenShift 4.7, the latest version of the company’s enterprise Kubernetes platform.
Granulate announced the release of its open-source platform, the G-Profiler, a production profiling solution that measures the performance of code in production applications to facilitate compute optimization.
Checkmarx announced the launch of KICS (Keeping Infrastructure as Code Secure), an open source static analysis solution that enables developers to write more secure infrastructure as code (IaC).