The World Quality Report for 2019-20 (WQR), released by Capgemini, Sogeti and Micro Focus, highlights testing for security as the clear top priority for QA teams. On the upside, 58% of the research respondents reported they now undertake security testing in cloud environments, up from 42% in 2015. A majority (53%) also reported that test automation has reduced the overall security risk to their organization. However, 44% of respondents have highlighted “enhance security” as the most important IT priority this year.
The WQR has been published now for 11 years , and its findings are this year based on interviews with more than 1,700 respondents. The report provides some limited analysis of the QA priorities at financial firms specifically, but does note the increasing importance of artificial intelligence in testing. “We are seeing an acceleration towards adoption of advances in analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence in testing domains,” the report says. “[Financial firms] are adopting a ‘test smart’ rather than a ‘test all’ approach.
More generally, across different industry verticals, the report also highlights insufficient progress in test data and test environments management (TDM and TEM) as challenges continue to escalate for organizations: 60% of respondents this year said the greatest test environment roadblock they face is cost. This figure is up from 39% just two years ago.
Test automation (TA), a steadily growing trend over recent years, has delivered benefits including improved control and transparency of test activities (cited by 63%), better detection of defects (56%), and reduction of test costs (56%) and cycle time (54%).
However, this year’s survey indicates how TA is increasingly a full-lifecycle need and that this development is leading to gaps: when asked about the technical challenges they face in developing applications, 63% noted a ‘lack of end-to-end automation from build to deployment’, up from 55% in last year’s survey.
Greater use of automation and artificial intelligence are also revealing a skills gap in some organizations. 41% identified a ‘lack of proper skills for QA & Testing’ as a technical challenge. While 58% of organisations surveyed have brought in external AI expertise, either because it’s not part of their core business, (23%), they needed AI knowledge fast (24%) or it was a requirement for a limited amount of time only (11%).
In the past, the WQR has provided a useful benchmark for overall spending on QA as a proportion of firm’s IT budgets. This was 35% in 2015. The proportion has fallen to 29% this year, but the report’s authors say this is because quality issues are no longer a discrete area of activity. in other words: as quality becomes embedded across the software development lifecyle, it becomes harder to put a figure on QA costs.
