OREANDA-NEWS. The annual World Quality Report, published in conjunction with HP, examines the state of application quality and testing practices across multiple industries and geographies. The report this year found that organizations 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 speed of this digital transformation within organizations has been identified as a clear hurdle, with 55% of organizations identifying ‘application functionality changing too quickly’ as their biggest challenge.
 
In an attempt to gain control over the influx of new applications, the report found a 9% Y-o-Y increase in IT spending budgets directed towards testing and quality assurance. Of this budget, almost half (49%) 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% as companies begin to reign in their spending to focus on coping with the continuous transformation of applications.

A seamless customer experience is a key driver for QA testing

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%) 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 organizations. However, the role of the customer experience is now almost as important to companies with 79% identifying this as a key consideration for their quality assurance testing. This marks a notable shift for organizations who have come to realize the growing importance of providing customers with a smooth, seamless experience whenever they come into contact with the company’s properties.
 
Acknowledging the renewed intent on IT investment, Govind Muthukrishnan, Senior Vice President and Testing Global Service Line Leader, at Capgemini observes: “This year’s World Quality Report shows that we live in a fast moving world where customer experience and flexibility are as important as keeping pace with digital transformation using Agile QA and DevOps. Today, we see that organizations are making significant investments in Test Environments and Test Data - Test Ecosystems - and are focussing on end to end automation of not only Testing but also the Test Ecosystems. However, organizations must move beyond automation of Testing and Test Ecosystems to an integrated and intelligent QA Lifecycle that can deliver synergy in business assurance.”