DEVOPSdigest

While 75 percent of organizations highlight continuous testing as critical or important, only a minority of survey respondents have made exceptional progress acquiring the necessary knowledge and key enablers to drive digital transformation, according to a global study by CA Technologies.

The 20 percent 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.

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According to the study, Continuous Testing as a Digital Business Enabler(link is external), leaders were:

■ 2.3x more likely to have succeeded in left-shifting testing activity

■ 2.6x more likely to reduce defects by more than 50 percent

■ 2.4x more confident in quality of output

■ 1.9x more confident in speed of delivery

■ Leaders were also 3.9x more likely to be working in an organization exhibiting rapid revenue growth.

“As organizations 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,” said Jeff Scheaffer, GM, Continuous Delivery, CA Technologies. “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 percent of respondents reported testing automation as important, only 1 in 5 said they achieved a good level of test automation coverage (80 percent or more), leaving 4 out of 5 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 prioritize, and call out a singular key to success, 63 percent of respondents said it is the combination of agile development plus continuous delivery that optimizes 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.

Methodology: Conducted by Freeform Dynamics and commissioned by CA Technologies, the worldwide survey included 923 IT and testing professionals.