Businesses are struggling with speed of technological change: Capgemini
The speed of this digital transformation within organisations has been identified as a hurdle, according to IT service management company, Capgemini. In its annual World Quality Report, published in conjunction with HP, it found that 55 per cent of organisations identify ‘application functionality changing too quickly’ as their biggest challenge.
The annual World Quality Report examined the state of application quality and testing practices across multiple industries and geographies across 11 markets, including A/NZ.
In an attempt to gain control over the influx of new applications, the report found a nine per cent YoY increase in IT spending budgets directed towards testing and quality assurance. Of this budget, 49 per cent said it is dedicated to maintenance work, focused on trying to ensure applications are suitable for business use.
Relatedly, it found budget spend on new transformational work has decreased by one per cent as companies begin to reign in their spending to focus on coping with the continuous transformation of applications.
The report also found companies are continuing to invest in securing the integrity of their systems, with 81 per cent citing security as the main purpose for testing. This heightened awareness of security is said to be driven by digital transformation, and security testing has become critical to business assurance for many organisations.
However, the role of the customer experience is now almost as important to companies, with 79 per cent identifying this as a key consideration for their quality assurance testing.
Capgemini testing global service line leader senior vice-president, Govind Muthukrishnan, said this marks a notable shift for organisations that have come to realise the growing importance of providing customers with a smooth, seamless experience whenever they come into contact with the company’s properties.
“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 organisations are making significant investments in test environments and test data - test ecosystems - and are focusing on end to end automation of not only testing but also the test ecosystems.
“However, organisations must move beyond automation of testing and test ecosystems to an integrated and intelligent QA Lifecycle that can deliver synergy in business assurance,” he said.
Some other findings from the study include:
- Businesses in A/NZ are the highest spenders on hardware and infrastructure, investing 40 per cent of their budgets in new systems – three per cent higher than the global average.
- A gradual shift in business focus from cost optimisation to accelerating time-to-market with shorter release cycles.
- 59 per cent of respondents said at least half of projects within the organisation use DevOps principles and 47 per cent use virtual test environments.
- With an increasing number of organisations now adopting DevOps and Agile, there are a number of new roles being created, such as software development test engineers, to match the growing importance and size of the market.
