World Quality Report- What’s the Trend for 2015-16?

Increasing momentum of digital transformation and decreasing time-to-market for products has intensified the significance of Quality Assurance and Software Testing. The urgent need to evolve is rapidly shaking up organizations and their business operations. While this remains a major challenge, the seventh edition of the World Quality Report co-sponsored by Capgemini, Sogeti and HP report findings on application quality and testing trends along with recommendations for organizations to build strong testing practices. Based on a worldwide market study steered with 1,560 senior IT executives and testing leaders from across 32 countries, the report is a must-read for organizations that focus on QA and Testing. Here is the synopsis of the report that I have extracted for a quick read.

Let’s start with the Trends (Current and Future) revealed in the report…

Corporate Trends:

• World quality report survey data reveals that protecting corporate image is ranked as the single most important objective for QA and Testing.
• The report also reveals time to market as the crucial or very important part of their corporate strategy.
• A clear shift in focus to customer experience and security is noticed.

QA and Testing Budgeting:

• The realized budget for QA and Testing was increased from 26% (2014) to 35% (2015), which is a 9% increase.
• It is predicted that budget in the future will increase to 40% by 2018.
• Sectors that allocated the highest percentage of their total IT budget for QA and testing are High Tech, Financial Services and Telecom, Media and Entertainment and Automotive.

Digital Transformation Initiatives:

• Industry sectors that are established and progressive on Digital Transformation journey are spending the most on QA and Testing.
• A higher level of IT spend allocated to QA and Testing this year also indicates a need for a greater level of testing efficiency to keep pace with Digital Transformation initiatives.
• Digital Transformation is impacting professional skills needed for testing and focus of testing as well. Focus is required on:
  1. Adaptive and exploratory customer experience focused testing.
  2. Usability and performance testing.

Mobile Testing:

• 35% of QA and Testing budget for new development spent on Mobile and Front Office customer facing solutions and 17% in BI/Analytics.
• Focus areas in mobile testing for 2015 are:
  1. Security – 55%
  2. Efficiency and Performance – 54%
  3. Functionality – 48%
  4. User Interface and Ease of Use – 47%
  5. Compatibility and Regression – 45%

Ultra-short development cycles- Deciding on what to test and what not to test.

• Predictive analytics and continuous feedback will become major enablers for the prioritization of tests with continuous feedback from real world monitoring.
• Predictive analytics will enable QA and Testing teams to construct strategies for effective testing of upcoming project/releases/sprint/build using automated solutions for analyzing historical data on projects, releases and builds.
• Predictive analytics and ability to interpret feedback from production will allow to prioritize and ensure the right amount of testing is targeted at the right time.

Security Testing:

• Security Testing is the top IT strategy priority. Security scores more highly with a rank of 6.2 on a scale of 1 to 7 ahead of customer experience (6.1) and IT cost optimization (6.1)
• Security testing has not yet reached the level of maturity in many cases.
• Growth in automation enables security testers to do more with less.
• Primary function of application security testing is to identify and fix vulnerabilities early during the software development lifecycle. Automated security testing is playing an increasingly important role in this.

Agile and DevOps:

• The Scaled Agile Framework (SAF) methodology is the most used guideline and framework for testing.
• Three dominant test approaches used in Agile projects are exploratory, shift left (BDD/TDD) and lifecycle automation testing.
• Adoption of DevOps is causing new challenges for testing. The biggest challenge to implement QA and Testing in DevOps in organizations is lack of right skills.
• Another factor in the success of QA and Testing in Agile is a balanced global delivery model with greater adoption of distributed Agile through the creation of near-shore teams closer to the business.
• A shorter timeframe demanded in an agile and DevOps driven environment can only be met by increasing levels of automation
• Across all industries, security, customer experience, cost optimization, higher quality of software and better responsiveness to business demands are top 5 priorities for QA and Testing.
• TDD and BDD techniques are key elements alongside functional and manual testing in the new DNA of QA and Testing.
• More efficient use of external vendors with global delivery capabilities in a co-managed approach has made a big impact on the operational cost of testing personnel in recent years. Savings in order of 25% or more are not uncommon. The biggest advantage of this engagement model is that organizations can use managed models to scale up resources in a flexible and agile way.
• Matured automation frameworks and availability of skilled testers, makes it easy to speed up time-to-market
• 2015 data shows reliance on manual testing as the most important technical challenge for application development.
• Test case automation has increased from 28% to 45% in 2015.

Here are the industry challenges emphasized in the report:

• Lack of innovation in the development of efficient solutions has resulted in testing becoming a bottleneck in today’s fast paced business environments.
• The reliance on manual testing in the application development lifecycle is cited as the number one technical challenge by 39% of the respondents.
• Difficulty in identifying the right areas on which testing should focus and lack of professional testing expertise in agile teams are big challenges.
• 35% of respondents say that the number one digital transformation challenge is the need to achieve consistency across different channel interfaces (mobile, social and traditional systems).
• The two biggest challenges in testing mobile and multichannel solutions are the lack of an in-house test environment (38%) and the lack of sufficient time (36%).
• The number one challenge with testing in agile development projects is the difficulty in identifying the right area on which the test should focus.

Let’s see what the report has for the Market Sector…

The Leaders & The Laggers

• Transportation, Energy and Utilities, and Manufacturing are lagging behind in digital transformation and have plans to appoint Chief Digital Officers to fill in the gap.
• Consumer Products, Retail and Distribution (CPRD), Energy and Utilities, Transportation, and Manufacturing industry are focusing more on digital transformation initiatives.
• Telecom Media and Entertainment, Financial Services, High Tech, Automotive and Energy and Utilities have allocated more budget for QA and Testing in 2015.
• Adoption of automation testing is commendable in Telecom, Energy and High Tech industries.

Geographical Facet:

• Latin America as a standalone entity serves as an excellent same time zone, low cost, near-shore center for agile testing to the American Market.
• Southern Europe and UK are lagging behind in embracing automation.

Automotive Sector:

• The World Quality Report 2015 research findings reveals that 66% of respondents in Automotive Sector now have business/predictive analytics specialists in their testing organizations and 47% use predictive analytics techniques to construct test strategies.
• Automotive sector is spending more on QA and Testing in 2015 and allocated 35% of overall IT budget to QA and Testing. This is 6% higher than the previous year.
• Automotive sector test coverage is big and will continue to grow as the concept of connected vehicles take stronger hold.

Consumer Products, Retail and Distribution:

• The industry focus their mobile applications testing efforts on Security, ahead of user interface/ease of use and functionality testing.
• CPRD allocated 32% of IT budget for Testing and QA and expected to grow to 37% in 2018.

Financial Services:

• The industry respondents to the 2015 research study reportedly allocated a whopping 37% of their total IT budget to QA and Testing. This is a significant 11% increase over 2014.
• Adoption of automation testing is high in Financial Services (46%)
• 88% of FS participants in this year’s survey claims security as primary or very important component.

Healthcare and Life Science:

• The industry is clearly on an upward digital trajectory. HLS organizations increased their QA and Testing budget from 23% to 30% for 2015.
• Uplift in mobile testing in public healthcare subsector, which allocates 20% of the IT budget to new mobile development testing.
• HLS organization focus on BI applications testing. The top challenge for HLS organizations is finding the right skilled experts for perform BI testing and the second biggest challenge is validation of data quality.

High Tech:

• This sector allocated more of its IT budget to QA and Testing 37% than the average recorded in this World Quality Report for 2015.
• Budget allocation of the sector is expected to jump 43% by 2018.
• These are among the highest users of test case automation with 46%.

Government and Public Sectors:

• About 46% of Public Sector respondents are using agile testing, which is 8% lower when compared to the cross-section average.
• 78% of Energy and Utilities respondents claim security as a major or very important aspect of their IT strategy.

While some organizations are focusing on productivity or quality gains, the others are gearing up for the digital, agile, and DevOps journey. In short, focusing on rapid digital strategy adoption across industries globally is what this meaty report interprets in short. Hope it helped!