Key Areas for Improvement

While 57% of respondents say their teams have either “fully embraced Continuous Testing” or the “vast majority of teams are practicing Continuous Testing,” detailed responses surfaced several areas for improvement.

The report found that automation was not being used pervasively. Only 17% of respondents claimed to use automation throughout the testing process, and only 22% claimed to have achieved in-sprint automation. This points to a need to evolve processes and tools to eliminate bottlenecks in the application delivery lifecycle. Until organizations can match the speed of testing to the speed of development, quality will continue to be a bottleneck to getting new functionality into the hands of end customers. This, in turn, directly impacts an organization’s ability to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage.

Test environments are also clearly causing substantial frustration and delays, with 81% of respondents claiming that their agile teams spend more than 30% of their time getting test environments right. Providing complete test environments on demand, including test data and virtual services, will provide great returns. Respondents identified several areas that would positively impact application delivery including developing and testing against virtual systems, and allowing developers to work in parallel. Searching for, managing, and generating test data was identified as an area causing substantial delays.

Understanding what is actually going on in the process was another major concern. Almost half of respondents said that knowledge sharing and identifying bottlenecks are very challenging topics. Survey takers also felt that several other continuous delivery challenges were impacting their continuous testing journey. These include:

• The fact that releases are getting very complex, often involving multiple applications with dependencies and different technologies with potentially conflicting resources
• The goal to standardize and automate the release process
• The need to know what application content is in what release, and the status of that content in the pipeline
• The ability to address testing handoffs, communications, environment management, validation, and promotion

Orchestration was seen as an important solution to address these concerns.

What the Future Holds

In the near future, we’ll see test recommendation, orchestration and execution get much more precise and efficient via artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and machine learning. Tools will recommend and run tests based on what is in the pipeline, and alert teams when additional tests are needed. Continuous improvement will be built in to every application release cycle through ongoing data analysis from the pipeline and production, allowing teams to identify and address problem areas — always focusing on increasing efficiency while decreasing risk.

In the very short term (the next year) organizations expect to add more automation in test data and model-based testing. Respondents said that the most interesting advanced testing techniques include automated test environments and automated test data, which is in line with stated pain points.

Report Methodology

The report is based on 500 interviews with senior-level IT executives from large and medium-sized companies (over 1,000 employees) in industries industries including financial services, high tech, healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, media and entertainment, and manufacturing.

Read the Full Report

Read the full report, here.