An eagerness to ‘log out' of old technologies and rationalise applications in the wake of global recovery, and the adoption of cloud-based services are driving IT spends on quality assurance and testing.
These were among the findings of the World Quality Report released by Capgemini, Sogeti (its local professional services division) and HP. The report — which reviews application quality and testing practices across industries and geographies — notes that almost 85 per cent of the organisations polled recognised the need to update mission-critical applications in order to increase efficiency.
It also shows that 42 per cent of the companies plan to increase their budget allocation for quality assurance (QA) and testing. “With companies seeking to adopt agile delivery methods as part of their application quality assurance, the percentage of companies who are moving at least some of their IT systems to the Cloud had grown to 81 per cent,” it said.
Application security worries
Emerging economies were the fastest to adopt cloud infrastructure, the study found. The adoption of cloud and the growing reliance on Internet-based applications also puts the spotlight on application security, which in the past has typically been seen as an audit and risk management function. Nearly 27 per cent of large organisations are putting in place dedicated information security teams to design and test security procedures, it said adding that testing in the cloud would require a new generation of testers to manage the entire portfolio of IT services rather than just verifying the quality of individual systems.
The survey was spread across 1,200 CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, IT directors and managers, and QA managers across North America, Europe and Asia.
Dependence on outsourced testing
The report further underlined the continued reliance on outsourcing for application testing. Nearly 70 per cent of respondents employ contractors or third-party vendors for quality assurance. “No longer are they looking to only outsource test execution, but also testing strategy, user acceptance testing and security,” it said.
Preference for outsourcing continues to be co-location, followed by near-shore locations (that is, within the country or continent). But when it comes to offshore work, the location preferences are different between North American and European organisations. For instance, for companies in the US and Canada the next choice is often India, followed by China and Eastern Europe. Western and Northern European companies, on the other hand, indicated they prefer to outsource QA to Eastern Europe or China, more than India.